


a letter of confession from the time-out corner

by ArsenicInYourPudding



Category: Big Hero 6 (2014)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, beating the shit out of hiro, weird backwards narrative style
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-23
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-03-02 23:54:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 21,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2830616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArsenicInYourPudding/pseuds/ArsenicInYourPudding
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crises become infinitely more complicated in the aftermath. </p>
<p>Or, Hiro Hamada ends up in ICU and has to deal with the events that put him there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I had a really violent plot dream for BH6 a couple weeks ago and I've been kicking it around like, hm, that'd be fun to write! So here I am. 
> 
> Fair warning, the likelihood of me actually finishing this is...minimal. At best. Sorry in advance.

The room was quiet, and sunny, and for some reason the light outside his eyelids reminded him of the cafe when he was picking up an afternoon shift before his night class and the clock was making gleeful little skips and bounds toward closing time, the glow warm and lazy through the windows. There was a bouquet of daffodils on the windowsill, he knew from the last time he woke up, and his sticker-covered 3DS and a hard-sided case he half-recognized from Fred’s backpack on the table next to the hospital bed, and really, all Hiro wanted to do was close his eyes and keep on sleeping. 

  
He shifted, trying to find a more comfortable sleeping position, and a dull stab of pain coursed through his chest.  _ Ow. Motherfuck _ . That was going to get old.

  
The respirator hissed, but there weren’t hands moving around him to try to get him comfortable again, and no one said his name. Satisfied he wasn’t going to have to deal with people at the moment, Hiro opened his eyes.

  
The ICU hospital room was oddly cheerful, painted in robin’s egg blues with a wall of windows facing the nurse’s desk in the center of the pod. Hiro shifted around as much as he was able, looking around at the mid-afternoon sunlight. He couldn’t keep his eyes open for very long, they kept slipping shut every few seconds, but for some reason he kept forcing them back open. His whole chest ached, his throat was rubbed raw by the breathing tube, and he’d spent most of the past however-long passed out on a dirty mattress in a basement. The longer he was awake, the less he wanted to go back to sleep.

  
A woman in purple scrubs rounded the corner into his room. She smiled, delighted and warm, when she looked up from her tablet. “Hi, Hiro,” she cooed, leaning over the bed. She slid one of her hands under his on the side of the mattress. “I know it’d be really rude of me to ask you to talk right now, so I’m gonna ask you a few yes or no questions, and I want you to tap my hand for yes, and just move your fingers back and forth for no. Does that make sense?”

  
Hiro hesitated, and lifted his fingers a little before dropping them on the back of her hand.

  
She smiled broader. “Good, good. Do you remember what happened?”

  
Hiro’s eyebrows twitched. He could only remember having been awake one other time since he’d been in the ICU, but he remembered the basement, and the bags of blood,  just not how he’d arrived  _ here _ . He debated for a second before sliding his fingertips across the skin just above her wrist.

  
“That’s okay, sweetheart. There was a...” She faltered, her smile dropping for a second. “Some very bad people took you, but you’re safe now. That group of heroes that’s been in the news the past couple months - they’re the ones that saved you. Isn’t that cool?”

  
Hiro’s fingers tapped gently, but his stomach felt like someone had dropped an entire bag of dry ice in it. The team had to save his worthless ass  _ again _ . If he hadn’t wanted to face them before, he  _ really  _ didn’t want to now.

  
She smiled down at him. “Are you in any pain right now?”

  
He tapped her hand again. Her smile turned sympathetic. “On a ten scale, is it between a one and a five?”

  
In some recess of his mind, he could hear Baymax asking “How would you rate your pain?” and he almost chuckled at that. He took a second to evaluate - it was getting worse by the second. He swiped his fingertips across her hand.

  
She reached over him to press a small red button attached to a complicated IV set-up. Hiro followed the wires up to a series of bags hanging from a-- One of them was a deep red, mostly full, like the ones the skinny man had carried up the stairs. Hiro flinched away from it and his hand pulled away from hers, reaching over to scrabble weakly at the IV in his arm.

  
“ Hiro! Hiro, honey,  _ stop _ ,” the nurse insisted, grabbing his arms. “Shh, it’s okay. It’s just fluids and antibiotics and plasma to replace what you lost. Your body needs it, it’s okay. It’s alright. You’re safe.”

  
_ Replace _ . It was going in, not coming out. The respirator hissed in relief, and Hiro relaxed against the bed. His hand settled on hers again, and his index finger traced out SORRY on her palm.

  
“So-- Sorry? Oh, honey, it’s okay. It’s okay,” she soothed, brushing her free hand over his face. “You’re safe now, Hiro, it’s alright.”

  
He leaned into her palm as much as he was able on instinct, her skin dry and warm against his.

  
“Your aunt was just here, she should be back in a little while. We sent her down to the cafeteria to eat something.”

  
Hiro almost cringed. He didn’t even want to think about the trouble Aunt Cass was having to go through with him out like this. How was she going to deal with the hospital bills? Did she have someone covering the cafe? Was it just going to be closed until he could get his act together enough to go home? The cafe was their entire life - their entire rent check, their heating bill and their groceries and when would he stop fucking everything up?

  
The nurse pulled her hand away to make a few notes on her tablet. “The respiratory specialist is going to see about getting you off that ventilator in a day or two, and we’re talk about moving you down out of intensive care. Sound like a plan?”

  
He tapped his fingertips against her forearm. The pain in his chest was dissipating, and so was his drive to stay awake. He blinked slowly a few times, and felt the nurse brush his hair away from his face. “It’s alright,” she said softly, “you can go back to sleep. That’s the medicine woking. I’ll be back to check on you in a couple hours.”

  
He squeezed her hand weakly, and the last thing he heard before he drifted off again was her saying, “You’re safe now, kiddo.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

The next time he woke up, Hiro was in a different room entirely. This one was a pale green, just a shade or two lighter than Baymax’s hard drive chip, and the ache in his chest was an entirely different feeling than the pain he’d gotten used to in the last few days. The only person he wanted to be here with him was the only person who couldn’t be. 

  
He turned his head a little bit to the right, squeezing his eyes shut again.

  
“Hiro?”

  
He went stone still, trying to process the voice, and a large hand covered the pair of his resting on his stomach.  _ Wasabi _ , his brain supplied. The respirator hissed in the sudden silence, and Wasabi said quietly, “Kiddo, if you’re actually awake, it’d make me feel a whole lot better if you’d look at me.”

  
Reluctantly, Hiro turned his head back and opened his eyes. Wasabi offered him a shaky, relieved smile and squeezed his hand. “Welcome back, bud,” he sighed, and Hiro’s eyes stung.

  
“Hey, hey, hey, what’s wrong?” Wasabi hunched over Hiro’s shoulder, hands hovering, trying to find the source of the problem.

  
Hiro shook his head, just a little jostling of the breathing tube, and reached for Wasabi’s hand.  _ SORRY _ , he traced out again on Wasabi’s palm.

  
Wasabi frowned. “One more time,” he asked, and he sounded apologetic.

  
Dutifully, Hiro traced the letters again, larger and slower this time. Wasabi’s mouth moved with them, spelling out the letters one at a time in a faint whisper. “Sorry? What-- Kiddo, you don’t have anything to be sorry for. Christ,  _ you’re  _ the one in the hospital. We should be apologizing to you.”

  
Hiro didn’t respond, just returned his eyes to the ceiling tiles above him, guilt breaking over him like a wave.

  
“Everybody’s going to be really glad you’re awake,” Wasabi suggested, his voice quiet in the persistent silence. “Gogo and Fred took your aunt back to the cafe to grab some stuff, but they should be back anytime. Honey Lemon’s running a couple errands, she said she’d come by around noon again.”

  
Hiro reached over his waist for the hand Wasabi was still holding, the IV lines tugging in an odd tangle as he moved, and tapped the top of his wrist.

  
Wasabi watched the motion, eyebrows drawing together. “What time is it?” When Hiro nodded, he shifted and dug in his pocket for his cell phone. “It is...9:19 AM exactly, on January 2nd.”

  
_ January 2nd _ . Hiro stared over Wasabi’s shoulder, processing.  _ I missed the first Christmas without Tadashi _ , he thought, dazed by the information. How had Cass managed it, with Tadashi gone and Hiro god-only-knew-where? Hiro felt something in his chest lock up, and the respirator wheezed into the silence. He should have been home for her, dealing with Tadashi’s death all over again would have been hard enough without dealing with Hiro on top of it. If he’d just been paying more attention...

  
“Hiro,” Wasabi said gently, “I’ve known you for a little while now, so I’m gonna try to make an educated guess about where your head’s at right now. Just-- Let me know if I’m way off base here, okay?” He waited for Hiro to manage a small nod before continuing. “Your brain is probably trying to make this all your fault right now. I don’t know how exactly, but you’re probably trying to find all the blame in this situation that you can possibly figure a way to hoard for yourself, because somewhere along the way you figured that if you were responsible for a problem, you could find a way to fix it.”

  
He may have cringed away from him, because Wasabi squeezed his hand and leaned forward a little, elbows braced on his knees. “Hey. Kiddo, it’s okay. I do the exact same thing. I think it’s just a weird side effect of the robotics thing. Problems are just...things to be engineered around. Things we can fix, with the right part or technique or amount of effort, and it took me a long damn time to figure out that the world is not a big machine. I mean, it  _ is _ , in a lot of ways, but it’s a very poorly designed machine. There are things that don’t really do anything and they break when they shouldn’t and it’s generally way too big with too many moving parts. And most of what happens to you in life? It’s not your fault.  _ This  _ isn’t your fault. There isn’t a problem for you to fix right now, beyond taking good care of yourself and letting us help where we can, okay?”

  
The urge to argue caught in the back of Hiro’s throat, wedged against the breathing tube like a cold he couldn’t shake. Instead, he wiggled his hand out of Wasabi’s and traced  _ CASS?  _ on his palm with his index finger.

  
Wasabi watched Hiro’s finger move against his hand. “Your aunt’s doing okay,” he reassured, catching Hiro’s hand again, “she’s...rattled, not gonna lie, but we’re taking good care of her for you.” He chuckled quietly. “We’re kinda camped out all over your living room, have been for a couple weeks. We’ll get the mess cleaned up before they let you go home, I swear. I’ll Lysol the whole damn place by myself until it sparkles, if I have to.”

  
Hiro let Wasabi’s reassurances sink in for a second, before lifting his hand a little and tracing  _ BAYMAX  _ into his palm.

  
“Baymax is fine. Still deactivated in the workshop, as far as I know. Were you in the middle of upgrades?”

  
Hiro squinted, trying to remember. He could remember the basement, the men who kept him there, but everything before that seemed to disappear in a thick fog of finals anxiety, loneliness, and oncoming grief.  _ IDK _ , he traced into Wasabi’s palm after a minute.

  
“No worries, I just didn’t want to disconnect him from your computer if you weren’t done. One of us can go run a quick diagnostic before they send you home. We weren’t sure how the hospital would feel about Baymax relative to the ‘friends and family only’ visitor policy in this wing, but we figured we’d probably better not risk it. He’ll definitely be waiting for you at home, though. If ever there was a time for a personal medical assistant, right?”

  
Hiro nodded absently, the breathing tube jostling. His ribcage felt overstuffed and uncomfortable, and the rest of him felt heavy and exhausted. He wasn’t aware of his eyes closing until Wasabi brushed his hair away from his face and said quietly, “Yeah, you get some rest. I’ll be here until your aunt gets back.”

  
If he was being honest with himself, he almost didn’t want to think about seeing her again.

 


	3. Chapter 3

In a lot of ways, being on a breathing tube was a blessing in disguise. Hiro wasn’t expected to answer hard questions or participate in long, drawn-out interviews about did he remember what had led to his time in ICU and what were the extent of his injuries. He did remember, bits and pieces, not very much but more than he’d prefer, and yes, he was painfully aware of the extent of his injuries. Collapsed lung, broken and bruised ribs, busted knee. It all hurt, and no, he didn’t want to talk about any of it.  

  
The team approached his forced silence with varying degrees of tact and success. Wasabi told stories when he was on Hiro Watch - incidents in the lab and at the cafe that had transpired in Hiro’s absence at first, and then he branched into family lore, stories about his sisters and niece and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents. It was a surprising wealth of names, and each one came with a Viking-esque modifier - “Uncle Jeff, the alcoholic” or “Jen, the one with the twins” and after an hour or so Hiro gave up on trying to match the players in each story to the mental map he’d tried to build in his head. Wasabi rambled, his winding, purposeless tales bleeding one into another, linked by “Oh, that reminds me”s and “Did I tell you the one about the cat and the vacuum cleaner?”s, and very rarely did he pause for Hiro’s input. It was soothing, the constant flow of noise, and Hiro couldn’t really help drifting off in the middle.

  
Gogo had appeared in the open door of his hospital room at noon on the first day and thrust a carton of something hot and a wrapped pair of chopsticks into Wasabi’s hands before shooing him out of the room with a brusque “Go help Cass with paperwork.” She’d settled into the chair next to the bed and fished a weatherbeaten paperback out of her bag, the dismembered cover a makeshift bookmark about a quarter of the way through. “Do you want me to start over, now that you’re awake,” she’d asked, pulling the chair closer and propping one tightly-laced sneaker on the frame of the bed.

  
She read to him, her voice a surprisingly fluid cadence as she picked her way through the story. “Cass said she was pretty sure this was your favorite, and I had a copy at home,” she’d explained to Hiro’s curious glance when she looked up from the third page. She didn’t try to do voices for the different characters, like Aunt Cass had done when he was little, but her voice was easy to follow and kept pace with the story, and she only paused once or twice between chapters to ask in few words if Hiro was feeling up to continuing. He was grateful for it - he wasn’t looking forward to having a serious discussion with anybody, but he was probably dreading the impending heart-to-heart with Gogo the most.

  
Fred appeared to have taken full-time Aunt Cass Duty, so his shifts at Hiro’s bedside were few and far between. He seemed content to pop the newest Pokemon game into Hiro’s 3DS - “Saw it and thought of you, buddy,” he’d said, peeling the shrink wrap off the game case - and adjust the bedframe under Hiro’s mattress so he could sit up a little and play. He only made the occasional comment, about the comic in his hands or the game when he recognized a change in the music, and otherwise just stuck close enough to watch the monitors and the screen of Hiro’s game. It was a good boredom killer, even if Hiro couldn’t stay awake to play very long at a stretch, and Fred always made sure to save his game for him when he nodded off. To be honest, Hiro hadn’t expected Fred to be so chill about the whole thing, but it made sense. In a weird, Fred-ish way.

  
Honey Lemon, on the other hand, had the hardest time remembering he couldn’t actually participate in conversation. She brought her laptop and a new selection of movies every time she came, and Hiro had never realized how much they talked while watching movies together until he couldn’t actually say anything to fill the gaps she left him. It seemed to be frustrating both of them, with his stunted, exhausted brand of non-verbal communication and her struggles with the concept of yes or no questions only. He loved her, really he did, but after a point he usually ended up faking sleep so he wouldn’t have to not-talk to her. The looming cloud of things Hiro really didn’t want to talk about seemed to expand whenever she was around.

  
He didn’t catch Aunt Cass sitting with him until almost the end of the third day after they moved him out of the first room. He assumed she  _ was _ sitting with him, the others told him plenty of times that she had only just left or was on her way back, but he always somehow drifted off before she returned. He guessed she probably came late in the evenings, once the cafe was closed or maybe handed off to someone else for the last hour or so, but he could never quite manage to stay awake long enough to see her. Part of him wondered if he was trying very hard. She wasn’t someone he wanted to talk to, either.

  
When he did catch her, she was half-curled in the chair by his bed, one foot pulled up onto the seat so her cheek could rest against her bent knee. The window to his right was as dark as downtown San Fransokyo ever got, a faint blue and green glow bleeding up from the lower edge of the window. The room itself was lit only by the light from outside in the hallway, and the angle pulled sharp shadows across Cass’s face. Something he hadn’t even realized was there vanished from his chest, and the sudden lack of tension was almost a physical pain in its own right. He’d  _ missed _ Aunt Cass, when he had the energy to think about much of anything beyond his hospital room, and even in the cold, damp basement, all he wanted was someone to take him home to her. His eyes stung, and he blinked hard. The respirator seemed to sigh next to his bed.

  
Aunt Cass flinched, awakened by ostensibly nothing, and pushed her hair away from her face as she sat up and looked around blearily. She looked like she was about to write the cause of her sudden awakening off as some noise down the hall, settling back into the chair to go back to sleep, when her eyes landed on her nephew’s face. “Hiro? Honey?”

  
He blinked at her a couple times, his fingers twitching toward her, and she swallowed what would probably have been a loud sob and fell forward toward him, seizing his hand in hers and peppering his face with kisses. “My baby,” she choked, her forehead resting against his. “Ohh, my baby boy.”

  
He squeezed her hand and leaned into her palm when she threaded her fingers through his hair. It was probably a good thing he was on a respirator, he thought, because the lump - relief or guilt, he couldn’t say which - in his throat would have made talking impossible anyway.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one's kinda short, I might post another one later tonight if I survive my family stuff today. 
> 
> Happy holidays, y'all!


	4. Chapter 4

The respiratory specialist ended up leaving the respirator in place four days after he woke up. Legitimate medical concerns about his right lung deflating if left to its own devices aside, Hiro was a little fed up with the constant game of minimalist charades to communicate with whoever happened to be sitting with him. By the last day, Honey Lemon had brought in a small whiteboard and a rainbow of colored markers, which was easier, if still tedious, and they ended up playing hangman for an hour anyway. 

  
But then the doctor worked the plastic piping up out of his throat and it  _ hurt _ but he could talk again, quiet and rasping and only for a few words at a time and still an infinite improvement on where he had been.

  
“I sound like a chain smoker,” Hiro whispered to Gogo after the nurse had left, and she just laughed and pushed a glass of water in his direction on the tray.

  
She was still sitting with him when another nurse came by to check the surgical dressings on his chest. Hiro studied the healing scar as the bandage peeled away, a short, jagged line tracing across the right side of his chest, and glanced up at Gogo, expecting a “Badass, dude” or a “That’s nothing compared to this one.” But when he looked up, she was staring glassy-eyed at the scar, shoulders tense and one fist curled tight on top of her knee. Her eyes jerked up, and she blinked hard a few times. “You okay,” she asked. The set of her jaw looked oddly desperate.

  
He paused for a minute, head cocked, and reached a hand out on the railing of the bed. “Yeah,” he rasped. Her hand curled around his and squeezed, a little uncomfortable, and he squeezed back as hard as he could manage.

  
The nurse finished poking and prodding and re-dressed the wound with a smile and a “Looks good, kid” before retreating to the nurse’s station outside. Gogo’s hand had shifted around so her fingertips were pressed against his pulse point. “Are you okay,” Hiro asked, settling back against the pillows and adjusting so he was laying on his side facing her.

  
Gogo studied him carefully for a second. “I’m good, I just...” She took a deep breath, like someone about to plunge into freezing water. “Flashbacks, you know.”

  
Hiro felt his face scrunch up. “Flashbacks?”

  
“ Yeah, I--” She exhaled sharply, bending forward to brace her elbows against her knees. She held onto one of Hiro’s hands in both of hers, tracing the lines of his bones under his skin. “When...he shot you. I was at the top of the stairs. I watched--” She choked, and looked up with a strangled, grief-stricken little laugh, shaking her bangs out of her eyes. “You were already down, there was-- I thought he’d killed you. The gun went off, and you were-- You were just  _ laying there _ , and there was blood  _ everywhere,  _ and he turned around and we just... We just stared at each other. And-- And I... I  _ understood _ , what you wanted to do to Callahan.”

  
_ Callahan _ . One of Hiro’s many and illustrious recent failures. “I’m sorry,” he managed, thin as paper.

  
“ _ Don’t _ ,” she snapped. “Don’t you fucking-- Hiro, I almost  _ killed  _ for you. And I  _ let him go _ , so I could hold you together, with my hands and a fucking  _ prayer,  _ that I wouldn’t lose you. I would have killed him for killing you, because you are the batshit little brother I never fucking wanted, and  _ I never wanted any of you  _ and somehow-- God  _ damnit  _ Hiro, do  _ not  _ apologize. For  _ any  _ of that.”

  
Hiro was stunned into silence. Gogo pulled one hand away from his hand and scrubbed it across both eyes. “I thought,” she said after a tense silence, and cleared her throat, “I thought I was too slow. I thought... If I had just had my head up a little higher, paid a little more attention before they took you, then maybe... Maybe we wouldn’t be here now.”

  
Uncertainly, Hiro tugged on Gogo’s hands. “Wasabi says I don’t get to blame myself,” he whispered.

  
Gogo scoffed, and favored Hiro with a weak, damp smile. “He tried to give me that speech a few days ago, I told him to shove it up his ass.”

  
Hiro smiled back and squeezed her fingers. “I’m okay,” he rasped, trying for reassuring.

  
“ You got  _ shot _ ,” she said bitterly. “You’ve been in ICU for nine days, five of which you spent in a coma, because we weren’t... We weren’t  _ there _ .”

  
He paused, unsure how to approach that. He only vaguely remembered the days before, the general end-of-semester stress and compounded emotional issues after what he was pretty sure had been an epic fuck-up on his part. From what he could recall, he’d more or less gone out of his way to make sure the team  _ wasn’t _ there. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, for lack of anything else to say.

  
“ If you apologize to me one more goddamn time, I’m going to break your fucking  _ knees _ ,” Gogo said darkly, standing and leaning over the bed to wrap him in a careful hug.

  
Hiro let his nose press into her shoulder, one hand coming up to grasp the side of her old t-shirt.  _ I can still be sorry _ , he thought petulantly, and didn’t say anything.

 

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

Unfortunately, Hiro’s IV was, more often than not, one of the first things he saw when he woke up, and it didn’t matter how different the rest of his surroundings were - his clean, gently lit hospital room, with it’s green walls and big windows bracketing his bed, compared to the damp, dark basement, with the dirty mattress pushed up against one cold concrete wall and single bare lightbulb hanging precariously from the ceiling by the stairs - his half-awake brain latched on to the plastic tubing coursing up from the crook of his arm and  _ panicked _ . 

  
“Hiro! Hiro, sshh, it’s alright, it’s just fluids and antibiotics, don’t pull on it, you’re okay.” Hiro squeezed his eyes shut and took a slow, wavering breath. When he opened them again, Honey Lemon was pulling her fingers through his hair, her eyes wide and sad. “You’re safe, it’s okay.”

  
His heart gradually slowed back down, and he leaned into Honey’s hand. “Sorry,” he sighed.

  
She shook her head, pressing her lips together. “How are you feeling?”

  
Hiro coughed and reached for the remote to adjust the bed frame. “Lousy,” he said. His voice was still rough, but it was stronger than it had been the day previous, less prone to cutting out mid-word. “You?”

  
She smiled sadly and kept threading her fingers through his hair. “I’m alright,” she said. “How did you sleep?”

  
“Like a rock,” Hiro grumbled. “But hey, at this rate, I’m just going to sleep enough for the rest of my life while I’m here. Imagine how productive I could be later.”

  
“Wasabi won’t like that,” Honey noted with a small, faintly damp laugh. “The lab misses you, though.”

  
“Oh, I’m sure,” Hiro muttered, rolling his eyes.

  
“ They  _ do _ , Hiro,” Honey insisted. “I had six people ask me how you were when I was in the lab yesterday, and there was hardly anyone even there. Everyone can’t wait to have you back.”

  
He didn’t respond, and Honey Lemon sighed and changed the subject. “Wasabi’s running a diagnostic on Baymax, so he’ll be ready to go back to your house when they release you. He said something about tune-ups and upgrades to Baymax’s trauma recovery protocols.”

  
Hiro closed his eyes, half-missing and half-dreading Baymax’s soft, gently warmed nylon and carefully non-threatening voice. At least he could turn Baymax off, and he could play the  _ I’ve got Baymax, I’ll be okay  _ card to get people to leave, but the nurse bot was his brother’s legacy, the last vestige of Tadashi’s presence in his life, and of all the people Hiro had failed recently, Tadashi was first and foremost in a lot of ways. “That’s good, I guess.”

  
Honey’s fingertips massaged against his scalp, and Hiro was distantly aware that he hadn’t actually had a proper shower in weeks - he’s been on bed baths since he’s been in ICU, and before that, they bled him so much he could barely stand, much less indulge in personal hygiene even if they’d given him the opportunity, so his hair is still vaguely greasy and tangled, and it’s going to be a bitch to comb through once he finally gets home. “Has the physical therapist been by to talk to you,” she asked.

  
“Yesterday, yeah. After they took the breathing tube out.”

  
“What did they have to say?”

  
Hiro shrugged. “I sat up on my own for the first time, that was something.”

  
Honey grinned. “That’s great! Really good progress!”

  
“ Yeah,  _ sitting up _ . One small step for man,” Hiro muttered with a bitter little laugh.

  
“Hiro,” Honey chided. “I know you’re frustrated, but you have to give your body time to heal. It isn’t fair to be angry with your cells just trying to do their best.”

  
“ Easy for you to say,” Hiro said petulantly. “You’re not the one who’s been bedridden for two weeks and dragged five other people’s lives to a complete  _ standstill _ .”

  
Honey Lemon frowned. “My life isn’t at a standstill,” she noted. “Neither is Wasabi’s, or Fred’s, and I’m not sure that there’s a person on earth who could so much as break Gogo’s stride. Your Aunt Cass is still running the cafe, classes will start again in two weeks, the lab is as busy as it ever is over winter holidays.” Her fingers worked absently at a collection of tangles near the back of Hiro’s head. “I, for one, am happy I can be here for you, Hiro, and I know the others all feel the same.” She bit her lip. “We all feel...responsible, in a way. Those men never would have been able to get past us if we’d been there.”

  
Hiro rolled his head and nudged at her palm. His internal filter shorted out with an almost audible  _ fzzt _ and he sighed. “I was avoiding you,” he confessed quietly. “You weren’t there because I didn’t want you to be.”

  
“Oh, Hiro,” Honey murmured. “What did we--”

  
“It wasn’t you,” Hiro clarified in a rush. “No. It was...” He cracked a sarcastic little smile up at her. “Is there a way to say ‘It’s not you, it’s me,’ that doesn’t sound terrible?”

  
“Not really, I don’t think. What do you mean?”

  
He exhaled heavily and didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “I’m not.... I’m more trouble than I’m worth, sometimes,” he began slowly. “And I was just...not in a great place and you guys had final projects and exams and you didn’t need to be dealing with me then. So I just...removed the problem.”

  
“ _ Hiro _ ,” Honey said, her tone disapproving. “You know better. You’re never a problem.”

  
Wordlessly, Hiro swept his hand through the air over his torso and raised his eyebrows pointedly.

  
Honey frowned down at him. “You’re not listening to me at all. We’re  _ all  _ here for you, because we love you. Not just when you’re making incredible things in the lab or helping us save San Fransokyo, we love you  _ all the time _ , okay?  _ Especially  _ when you think you’re a burden, because that’s when you need us the most. We’re always here for you.”

  
Hiro made a noncommittal noise and gave up on the argument. “Have they said anything about sending me home?”

  
“I think Cass said they wanted to hold you for another day or so, make sure your brain functions have returned to normal. Soon, though.”

  
_ At least I’ll be off the IV,  _ he thought.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note: I am not in any way medically inclined. I would frankly rather die than go in for my regular checkup. Any medical discrepancies are acknowledged and should be disregarded. This is fanfic, not nursing school.


	6. Chapter 6

“I really don’t understand why _three_ people are necessary to get me ready to go home,” Hiro grumbled. The nurse helping him into a wheelchair laughed, and Gogo finished zipping up the duffel bag on the chair. Hiro had accumulated more of his belongings in the hospital room than he’d have anticipated - over the last week and a half he’d been awake, the team and Aunt Cass had been bringing in little bits and pieces, clean clothes and movies and his favorite blanket, which Hiro had been pathetically grateful to be reunited with after an unfortunate string of nightmares. It had taken a good twenty minutes to get it all packed into the duffel bag Gogo was swinging onto her shoulder, complete with two extra passes to make sure they hadn’t forgotten anything.

“If it helps, I’m just here for legal reasons,” the nurse said cheerfully. “In that if they let you out of the building without an escort, and you have a heart attack in the elevator or trip down the stairs or something, the hospital would really like to not be sued for it.”

“And I’m sure Hiro is very grateful for your help,” Gogo said pointedly. Hiro nodded up at the nurse dutifully as he was wheeled out of the now-empty hospital room and down the hall to the nurse’s station.

Aunt Cass was leaning against the counter, debating something with the woman tapping at the computer tucked into the desk. She turned when she heard Gogo’s voice and smiled broadly. “Hiro! I’m just trying to get your first follow-up appointment squared away and then we’ll be all set to go.”

“Wasabi or I could take him,” Gogo offered, “if you’re worried about working around the cafe’s hours.”

“That’d actually be _really_ helpful,” Aunt Cass said, eyebrows jumping up. She turned to the nurse at the desk. “Do you still have the Thursday at 11 open, then?”

The nurse made a few quick keystrokes and rolled over to grab a sheet coming off the printer. “Enjoy being home, Hiro, take it easy,” she said with a warm smile.

He offered a weak smile of his own and waved a little as the nurse behind the wheelchair rolled him down the hall and into the elevator. “I think you’ve probably gotten the home rules spiel from your physical therapist and your doctor,” the nurse said, “but just in case - no spicy foods, don’t overexert yourself, be very gentle with the incision, and the rest of you, for that matter, no caffeine, be careful with your medication and don’t take anything that wasn’t prescribed to you, and I shouldn’t have to tell you no alcohol since you’re, what, like twelve, but I’m going to tell you anyway. _No_ alcohol.”

Hiro tilted his head to grin up at him. “Don’t worry, I’m not that cool,” he said, and the nurse laughed. To his left, Gogo coughed into the back of her wrist to cover a grin.

“We’re going to keep it really simple for dinner tonight,” Aunt Cass said to no one in particular. “I’m thinking miso soup, or maybe soba. What sounds good, Hiro?”

The sudden reality of where he was heading swept over him as the numbers overhead ticked downward like a bomb getting ready to blow. Up until now, he’d been able to pretend he was just going to physical therapy again, or down for a CT scan or some other test as the doctors were periodically insistent upon, but so far he’d stayed in the upper reaches of the hospital - the closest he’d been to street level was the eleventh floor, where the MRI suite was. Now, the numbers were counting down into single digits, and Hiro pressed his hands into his lap to mute their trembling.

Gogo reached over and rubbed his shoulder. “Everything okay,” she asked softly.

“M’good, I just--” Hiro gave an aborted little twitch of a shrug and didn’t meet her eye.

The elevator doors pulled back, and the nurse pushed Hiro out into the bustling lobby of the hospital. Gogo and Aunt Cass followed a pace behind. Out of the corner of his eye, Hiro could see someone wave enthusiastically, and when he turned to investigate, Wasabi was making his way through the crowd with a clear plastic bag in hand. “Hey, little dude, how’re you holding up?”

“It took three of you to pick me up from the hospital,” Hiro said flatly, turning his head to look pointedly at Aunt Cass.

“We’re multitasking,” Wasabi said cheerfully.

“I needed a couple extra hands,” Aunt Cass confirmed. “Honey and Fred have the cafe until I get back, Wasabi was picking up your prescriptions, and it would have taken an extra hour to get you out of here if Gogo hadn’t gotten you packed up while I was scheduling your follow-up.” She leaned over and kissed the top of Hiro’s head. “Don’t be a sour grape,” she said, ruffling his hair.

“I’ll be a sour grape if I want to be a sour grape,” Hiro recited defiantly under his breath. It was an old back-and-forth between them from when he was little, and, if he was honest with himself, not something he’d heard her say since Tadashi died. Maybe she was letting him grieve without her “pestering” him. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it until it was back again.

“I’m going to go pull the car around, you three wait here,” Aunt Cass ordered, leaving Wasabi and Gogo with the nurse standing behind his wheelchair.

“Well, Hiro,” the nurse said, “best of luck, a speedy recovery and all that.” He smiled and held out his fist. Hiro smiled thinly and tapped his knuckles with his own. “Here’s hoping I don’t see you in a professional capacity again.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Hiro agreed. The nurse reached across his shoulder to shake Wasabi’s hand, and then Gogo’s.

“You take care of yourself now,” he said, before slipping back into the crowd toward the elevators.

Wasabi took the handles of Hiro’s wheelchair and pushed him over by the large bank of windows facing out toward the street. The half-inch of snow that had fallen two or three days earlier had been reduced to small piles of dirty slush pushed up against the edges of the sidewalk, a soggy blend of ice and salt and dirt slumped against the street’s corners. “Seriously though, how are you holding up?”

Hiro’s palm covered the cotton ball taped in the crook of his opposite elbow. It had been an effort not to let on how edgy the IV had made him, even though the blood transfusion bag had been gone after the second time he woke up. It was a little bit of a pathetic relief to have it gone for good. “I’m...tired,” he said after a minute, frowning like the words left a bad taste in his mouth. “I’m sick of being tired.” _I’m sick of being a useless lump._

“No worries, man, your body’s just regaining it’s momentum. You’ll be back up and running in no time,” Wasabi assured him, one big hand squeezing Hiro’s shoulder.

Gogo braced one shoulder against the window next to them. One hand curled around the strap of the duffel bag over her shoulder while the other tapped at the screen of her phone. She snickered and held it up to show a picture of Fred juggling a trio of cranberry muffins behind the counter at the cafe, a smear of white icing balanced on the tip of his nose.

“That’s unsanitary,” Wasabi protested, wrinkling his nose at the phone.

“You seriously think the pastry case at the Lucky Cat is a sterile environment,” Hiro grinned, tilting his head back to look up at him as Gogo took her phone back.

“And Honey’s too smart to let him actually _sell_ those,” Gogo added, chuckling. “Besides. A few germs never killed anybody.”

“You can take that cavalier attitude about infectious organisms and stay _away_ from the kid still healing from surgery,” Wasabi replied loftily, angling Hiro’s wheelchair away from her.

“Oh come _on_ ,” Gogo said, rolling her eyes. “Germ exposure is essential to proper immune system development. You’re not doing him any favors keeping him in a bubble.”

“Says _who_?”

“Science! Science says that!”

Hiro snickered and lowered his head just as Aunt Cass was pulling up in the drop-off lane outside. “Guys,” he said, and Gogo and Wasabi quit bickering almost instantaneously. Hiro shrugged off an uncomfortable shiver at their sudden attentiveness to him and shook his head. Surely it was just the breeze from the automatic doors letting them out into the chilly January afternoon.

Aunt Cass pulled up next to the curb and Wasabi pushed the wheelchair to a stop next to the back seat door. “Here we go,” he said, helping Hiro stand and shuffle over into the car. A dull throb coursed outward from the scar on Hiro’s chest, and he winced as he settled into the soft, worn fabric of Aunt Cass’s upholstery.

Gogo slid into the opposite door and settled Hiro’s bag between them. She snapped her gum and grinned as Wasabi shot her a look over his shoulder as he was settling into the passenger seat.

Aunt Cass pulled out into the flow of midday traffic, a few flakes of snow swirling around the windshield. “Good riddance,” Gogo said with a vaguely exhausted finality as the hospital’s glowing green sign vanished when they turned a corner, and Hiro nodded in agreement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If y'all are experiencing snow and driving in it, please be very careful and safe. 
> 
> I almost spun out in front of a truck yesterday and it wasn't pleasant. At all.


	7. Chapter 7

For all the attention Hiro had given his fragile respiratory system - and rightly so, as the shiny pink scar on his chest reminded him - his knee was a problem all its own. The fracture from tripping ( _being pushed,_ he didn’t say) down the stairs into the basement had mostly healed, but it was still weak and throbbing insistently by the time Hiro shambled up the first set of stairs into the apartment above the Lucky Cat. He hadn’t thought it’d be a problem - he’d taken a few short walks around the hospital floor with his physical therapist, trying to get his body slowly reacclimated to normal movement again, and his knee hadn’t bothered him more than he could ignore. But now, with a flight of steps behind him, it was aching like he’d injured it all over again.

  
Gogo set his bag down next to the stairs and watched Hiro lean against the wall to take the weight off his left leg. “Doin’ okay,” she asked, eyebrows raised.

  
“Peachy,” Hiro muttered, taking a deep breath and pushing himself back upright. He limped toward the stairs - only thirty more steps and he’d be in bed again. He could handle this.

  
“Stop,” Gogo sighed. He paused, a tired and irritable “What _now_?” on his tongue, and she walked over to stand in front of him, her back to him. “Arms around my neck,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.

  
Hiro opened his mouth to argue. She wasn’t _seriously_ planning on carrying him up to his bedroom, was she? Gogo turned to look at him, the set of her jaw killing anything he might have said in protest. He limped across the half-step between them and wrapped his arms over her shoulders without a word.

  
She bent her knees, hitched Hiro’s around her waist, and straightened. “Jesus,” she muttered, her tone serious as she started for the stairs.

  
“If I’m too--”

  
“You are not too heavy,” she said over her shoulder, swift and authoritative. “You’re the exact opposite, which is not good, kid.”

  
Hiro rested his chin on her shoulder. “Can I play that card to get someone to buy me gummi bears,” Hiro asked, hiding his discomfort with the idea of _one more thing they had to fix_ under a half-joking request.

  
“I think something could be arranged,” Gogo said. She mounted the last step and crossed the small hallway that separated his room from Aunt Cass’s in four quick strides, stopping in front of his door. The whiteboard stuck to it bore the old, partially erased remnants of Aunt Cass’s handwriting, asking him to _please_ throw a load of laundry in when he got home, and if he got in late there were some spicy tuna rolls in the fridge that he could have for dinner (or breakfast, if he wanted). Next to it, someone had drawn a multicolored kaiju holding a sign that said “Feel better, yo!!” popping out of the corner. “Fred had some time to kill the other day,” Gogo explained. She let go of his good knee to reach for the handle and carried him inside. “Yo, Baymax,” she called, heading for Hiro’s bed.

  
The distinctive rustling of Baymax’s nylon skin heralded him shuffling over from Tadashi’s side of the room. They hadn’t changed much - his bed was still made, and his books were mostly where he’d left them - but Hiro had raided his desk and stolen a few older textbooks so he didn’t have to buy his own, and the room was starting to bleed into Hiro’s living space again. “Hiro,” Baymax said, and his vocal protocols were tilting toward that calm sort of concern that Tadashi had programmed. “Your friends have informed me of what has happened. How are you feeling?”

  
Gogo set him down on his bed. The comforter was freshly washed, he noticed, and smelled like Wasabi’s all-natural lemongrass detergent. The break in the uncomfortable familiarity of home was nice, he thought. “I’m okay, bud,” he said, giving Baymax a weak smile.

  
Baymax’s head tilted. “My scan indicates recent surgical procedures and some scarring on your lungs and trachea, and a small fracture on your left leg below the knee. I have updated my protocols to assist in your recovery. What changes to your medication have occurred?”

  
“Wasabi has all his prescriptions downstairs,” Gogo answered, turning down the blankets behind Hiro. “Just painkillers and antibiotics.”

  
“I am equipped with a medication dispenser and a dosage schedule,” Baymax said. “It is important to take your medications on time and to follow all directions given by a healthcare professional. I can keep your medications in a safe, controlled environment and dispense them when required.”

  
“ _Really_ , Tadashi built you to beat a childproof cap,” Gogo grinned, eyeing Baymax’s soft, stubby fingers.

  
“Don’t tease him,” Hiro chided, suppressing a smile of his own. The visual of Baymax struggling with a slippery orange bottle was enough to make his chest hurt trying not to laugh.

  
“Fine, fine,” Gogo chuckled. She helped Hiro crawl into bed and grabbed his wireless keyboard and mouse off the desk. “I think Fred downloaded some movies and a couple seasons of Community or something on your computer, but I have no idea where he put them, so enjoy that digital treasure hunt.” She settled down on the foot of Hiro’s bed, pulling her feet up onto the comforter and tucking her black athletic socks under her knees. “Wasabi said he was doing dinner and he’s getting groceries. You mind if we all eat in here with you?”

  
Hiro finished opening the file viewer on the screen across the room and shot her a look. “I _can_ eat at the table like a normal human being, you know.”

  
“But do you really want to limp up and down those stairs again? Because I’m not carrying you,” Gogo retorted.

  
Hiro made a displeased little noise and wrinkled his nose. “Whatever, you guys practically live here now anyway,” he said, returning his attention to the hunt for Fred’s movies. They weren’t in the file Hiro had specifically called _totally not illegally downloaded movies_ for a reason _,_ which was right on the desktop and why Fred hadn’t left them _there_ was irritatingly beyond him.

  
“Dude, it’s still your space. If you’re tired and don’t want to deal with us en masse, that’s your call. Just say so.”

  
Hiro wavered. He _was_ tired, between the flurry of activity being discharged from the hospital and the looming, low-level anxiety over being home again for the first time in nearly a month. But on the other hand, the bone-deep loneliness that had been sitting on him since even before he was abducted still hadn’t left, and being around the _team_ again, not just one at a time at his bedside, might help alleviate the knot in his chest a little bit. He shrugged, curling into the pillows behind him. “Yeah, no, uh. I don’t mind.”

  
Gogo smiled and reached out to ruffle his hair. “Awesome. I’m gonna go grab your stuff and find the sriracha before Wasabi can hide it from me again.” She scoffed. “Something about _polluting his cooking_ , I don’t know. Dude’s crazy.”

  
“And you put sriracha on everything,” Hiro noted, smiling up at her as she stood up off his bed.

  
“Damn right, you know me.” She set his cell phone within easy reach. “Baymax, make sure he doesn’t strain himself, please.”

  
Baymax shuffled over and sat delicately on the corner of Hiro’s mattress. “I will monitor his activity and see to it that he does not experience undue stress,” he said solemnly.

  
“Good bot,” Gogo said approvingly, patting his marshmallow arm as she sauntered from the room.

  
Once her footsteps had receded down the stairs, Baymax shuffled around to face Hiro. “Your friends have informed me of what has happened,” he said quietly, repeating his earlier words, but his tone was much more serious. “I have downloaded a database on post-traumatic stress disorder to better assist in your recovery.”

  
_There_ it was. Hiro frowned, a bitter taste crawling into his mouth. _He’s just trying to help_ , he reminded himself. “Thanks, Baymax,” he sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. “I’m okay, really. Just a little banged up.”

  
“Victims of a crime--”

  
“I am _not_ a victim,” Hiro spat, his shoulders jerking like a cable snapping taut. He sucked in a slow breath and forced himself to calm down. “Okay, I can...admit, that it jacked me up a little bit. But I’m fine. It’s over, and I just. I don’t want to deal with it anymore, okay?”

  
“It is normal to feel upset by a trauma like you have experienced for a significant length of time into the future,” Baymax countered. It was supposed to be reassuring, but all Hiro heard was _You’re going to be a mess that you can’t fix forever_. His shoulders hunched, and he curled over his keyboard as much as the dull ache in his chest would let him. “Many people who experience similar incidents have found that discussing their trauma with a friend or loved one, or with a trained psychologist, can help sort through confusing experiences.”

“Baymax,” Hiro said, his voice tight. “Can we just-- Just drop it, okay? For now. I just need some breathing room right now.”

  
“I will respect your desire for space,” Baymax said, nylon squeaking faintly as he stood up, “and I will continue to monitor your symptoms in accordance with the personal health profile my systems have compiled. I am happy that you have returned.”

  
Hiro gave Baymax a watery smile. “I’m happy to be home, too. I missed you, bud.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year, y'all!


	8. Chapter 8

The door creaked open just as Hiro was hitting play on his third episode of Community, his keyboard tucked in the space between his chest and his curled-up knees. “Hey, little man, how you feelin’,” Wasabi asked, carrying a bed tray with two steaming bowls balanced on top.

  
Hiro shrugged as he paused the episode, sitting up and setting his keyboard on the low shelves next to his bed. Wasabi held the tray up long enough for Hiro to gingerly readjust himself in his blanket nest before setting it down in front of him. “What did you make?”

  
“Nanna’s chicken and noodles,” Wasabi said, taking one of the bowls for himself and settling in Hiro’s desk chair. “Plenty of veggies for the vitamins, chicken for protein, and lots of calories so you don’t have to worry about eating the whole thing if you don’t feel up to it, it’ll still keep your strength up.”

  
Honey Lemon came filing through the door, holding two bowls of her own, followed by Fred and Gogo. Fred was carrying an armful of glass soda bottles that Hiro recognized from the cafe downstairs - he passed Hiro a ginger ale, Wasabi a peach soda, Gogo a Coke (cane sugar only, that’s all Aunt Cass carried), and traded Honey a sparkling clementine soda for his bowl of soup. Honey Lemon turned to Hiro. “Can I sit with you?”

  
Hiro steadied his tray with one hand and scooted over toward Wasabi. She settled in against his pillows and pulled her feet up. Her grey socks were printed with smiling cartoon clouds and raindrops. “Nice socks,” he said quietly, nodding to her feet.

  
Honey smiled broadly. “They’re so cute, right? There’s a boutique by the hospital, I was waiting for Gogo across the street last week and they were in the window.”

  
Hiro’s smile cooled a little, and he reached for his soup bowl.

  
Fred flopped into the beanbag chair and pulled his bowl down off the small card table he’d set it on. Gogo resumed her position seated on the end of Hiro’s bed, her bowl balanced on one of her bent knees. “Eat up, kiddo,” Gogo encouraged, slurping off her own spoon. “S’good stuff.”

  
“ Thank you, and don’t talk with your mouth full, what are you, nine?” Wasabi leaned over and squinted at her bowl. “Did you put _hot sauce_ in _my_ soup?”

  
“ It’s _my_ soup, and it’s not hot sauce, it’s _sriracha_ ,” Gogo returned loftily. “And it’s _delicious._ ”

  
“ _Heathen_ ,” Wasabi hissed, mock-offended.

  
Hiro let the sporadic flurries of conversation swirl around him for a few minutes, pushing infrequent spoonfuls into his mouth at strategic intervals and gesturing appropriately when addressed. The soup was delicious, much better than the bland hospital food he’d been eating for the past six days, but his stomach was still in knots. He swallowed the bite in his mouth and glanced at the red cube on the floor by the screen dividing Tadashi’s half of the room. “Um,” he said quietly.

  
The conversation - Gogo and Fred geeking out over the latest Grand Theft Auto game, he was pretty sure - ground to a halt. Four pairs of eyes fixed on him, and he shrank back into the pillows behind him, his words dying in his throat.

  
“You okay,” Fred asked, sitting forward in the beanbag chair.

  
“I-- Yeah, I’m. Uh.” He sucked in a breath and closed his eyes. Tadashi always told him to visualize notecards when he couldn’t get his words straight - line them up on an imaginary podium or tape them to a whiteboard in his head. “Can I, uh, talk to you guys?”

  
“Always, Hiro,” Wasabi said, setting his bowl down on the desk.

  
“I, uh, Baymax said-- He said that it might, I don’t know-- Y’know what, nevermind, I--”

  
“ Yo, dude,” Fred interrupted, uncharacteristically serious. He set his half-eaten soup on the floor between his feet and studied Hiro for a second. “Baymax knows his shit. If he says that telling us whatever is gonna help, or if _you_ think it’s gonna help, we’re all good for it. No questions.”

  
Hiro made a small, disbelieving noise in the back of his throat. “Yeah, whatever. You just feel guilty.”

  
“ Of course, dumbass,” Gogo said. Hiro’s head snapped up in surprise. “We _all_ feel guilty, and we _should_. We all have our own sins here. But the things we did or didn’t do, and how bad we feel about that, isn’t the priority here.” She reached across the tray table, and reluctantly Hiro curled his fingers around hers. “Whatever you need, Hiro. If you need to talk about what happened, if you need to talk about something else, if you need to be alone. All you gotta do is ask for it.”

  
“We love you, Hiro, and we just need to know what you need,” Honey said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders.

  
Hiro let his head roll to rest against Honey’s shoulder. She turned her head and kissed the top of his, her hand on his upper arm rubbing circles through his hoodie. He took a few deep breaths and glanced up at Gogo. “Baymax said it would help to walk someone through it,” he said quietly.

  
“It usually does,” Wasabi said. “But if you’re don’t feel ready, don’t force it.”

  
Tucked against Honey Lemon’s side, Hiro shrugged, hunching over the soup bowl in his lap. “No time like the present, I guess,” he muttered.

  
Gogo took a sip from her soda like she was wishing it was a beer bottle. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said quietly.

  
Hiro made his lungs expand as far as they could, and closed his eyes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this one's short, but the next one's a doozy. stay tuned, y'all.


	9. Chapter 9

“I was, um. Working from home,  I guess.”

“Avoiding us,” Honey Lemon filled in quietly, and Fred and Wasabi both sat up straighter.

“Not-- I wasn’t avoiding _you guys_ , it’s-- It’s really complicated,” Hiro said awkwardly.

Honey gave Hiro a gentle squeeze. “You explained it to me earlier, can I try?” Reluctantly, Hiro gave a little nod against her shoulder.

Wasabi and Fred shifted their attention to Honey, but Gogo’s eyes stayed pinned on Hiro. “He told me,” Honey began, “that he’d thought...that we were too busy to ‘deal with him’. That he was having a hard time, and didn’t want to bother any of us.”

“I was trying to deal with it on my own,” Hiro supplied.

Wasabi grimaced. “And none of us really gave you any reason to think that we weren’t too busy to help, did we?”

“Dude,” Fred said quietly. “I wasn’t even studying that hard, I should’ve hung with you instead of these losers. Sorry, yo.”

“What’s done is done,” Gogo sighed, taking another sip of her soda. “So that’s why you were by yourself?”

Hiro nodded against Honey’s shoulder. “I was going to wait out finals week, see if it got better. It wasn’t a big deal, I can handle it like an adult.” He stared at his hands cradling the half-eaten bowl of soup. “And then, the...Tuesday before finals, I guess, I was heading to campus on the metro.”

“That was the day we tried to ambush him,” Fred blurted, and Hiro raised his head.

Gogo rolled her eyes. “Fred and I were going to try to catch you on your way to class. Walk you there, grab a breakfast burrito on the way. But we didn’t see you, so we figured you’d just decided to stay home that day and headed back to the lab,” she explained.

Hiro went quiet, chewing on his lower lip. His head was spinning, and he couldn’t decide if he felt guilty or angry or scared or _what_ he felt. He closed his eyes, and he could see the metro station, all white concrete and polished stainless steel. “I saw you,” he confessed, laying his head back on Honey’s shoulder and keeping his eyes closed. She squeezed the ball of his shoulder before returning to rubbing at his upper arm. “At least, I thought I had. By the elevators.” His mind’s eye could see the upper level of the metro stop, teeming with commuters, the space above the train platform a yawning atrium inside a ring formed by the upper level. Through a sea of wrinkled suits and bulky-by-San-Fransokyo-standards winter gear, Hiro could see the back of Fred’s beanie, and the bright purple of Gogo’s hair streaks. “I, um. Doubled back down the escalators before you saw me. I was going to come up the other side of the station and just walk down the block, hope you didn’t see me.”

Aside from an unhappy noise from Fred, his audience remained silent. “I got back to the train platform and I was stepping off the escalator when this guy grabbed my arm, pulled me out of the flow of traffic. He had this picture of a little kid, I wasn’t really paying attention but he asked if I’d seen him. The kid, I mean. I said I hadn’t.” Hiro reached up to massage away the phantom grip on the arm tucked against Honey’s shoulder. “He... He said that...”

“If you need to stop, that’s okay,” Wasabi said gently. Hiro shook his head and cleared his throat.

“He said, ‘His parents haven’t seen him either. And if you don’t do exactly as I say, _no one_ is going to see him alive again.’”

Honey Lemon covered her mouth in shock. Gogo’s face darkened, mouth twisting unhappily. Fred crawled from the squishy confines of the beanbag chair and settled down on the bed next to Gogo. “We didn’t find a kid,” Wasabi said quietly.

Hiro shook his head and scrubbed a hand over his face. “No, there wasn’t. I mean, there might’ve been, but if he’d been there, he was...long gone, when they took me.”

“Oh, Hiro,” Honey murmured, hugging him tighter.

Hiro threaded his fingers through hers on his upper arm and curled up so he was almost in her lap. “Either way, they shoved me down into the basement and...yeah. That’s where I was until you guys found me.”

Gogo propped her elbows on her knees and frowned at the blankets between her and Hiro, thoughtful and worried. “What I don’t get,” she said, almost like she was talking to herself, “is what they _wanted_ with Hiro. They had him for just over two weeks, and there wasn’t anything resembling a ransom demand. He wasn’t tortured, they didn’t even really do anything visible to him, besides the obvious when we were closing in. So why take him at all?”

“Maybe they were experimenting on him,” Fred suggested. His usual enthusiasm for the idea of anything that could result in superhuman abilities seemed subdued.

Hiro rubbed his eyes. “That’d explain the blood,” he murmured.

“Blood?” Wasabi leaned forward, concerned and a little horrified. “What blood?”

Everyone’s attention returned to him, like someone had flipped the switch on an electromagnet. Hiro squirmed a bit. “They, um. Took a lot. Of blood, I mean. I was way out of it most of the time, I don’t know what they took it for.”

“They _drew_ blood? What like, just samples, or donation style, with transfusion bags and everything?” Gogo studied him carefully. If he squinted, Hiro could almost see the gears spinning at top speed.

“Donation style,” Hiro confirmed, getting a little light-headed at the thought.

“Oh my gosh, _that’s_ why you got so freaked out by the IV,” Honey breathed. “I thought... I don’t know what I thought, but... Oh, _Hiro_.”

“We did find some scattered bits of lab equipment,” Gogo said. “But we didn’t find any blood, or any that had been stored, at least.”

Fred snapped his fingers. “No, we did. We found a couple bags marked O Positive in that cooler, with all that other first aid stuff. We figured it was just them being over-prepared, didn’t we?”

“Hiro’s blood type is O Positive,” Wasabi noted.

Hiro glanced over at him. “The fact that you know my blood type when I don’t should be really terrifying,” he said dryly.

Wasabi shrugged. “You read someone’s medical chart enough times.”

“None of this changes the fact that the scum that did this are still out there,” Gogo said seriously. “And especially now that Hiro’s home, they may come back for him, to finish what they started. If they were trying to get rid of him as a witness, they failed.”

“Thankfully,” Honey murmured into Hiro’s hair.

“Dudes, my parents have a _bitchin’_ security system,” Fred suggested. “Little dude could come crash with me.”

“That’s, uh, really cool of you to offer,” Hiro said, “but I just got home. I don’t think I want to leave again so soon.”

“Maybe we call the police,” Honey said. “This _is_ their job.”

“Guys,” Gogo said, gesturing to the circle gathered around Hiro. “We’re _superheroes_. We can stand watch ourselves. Rotating shifts, until we catch these sons of bitches.”

Wasabi frowned. “We’ve completely taken over Cass’s home the past few weeks, I don’t think--”

“It wouldn’t be all of us at a time,” Gogo reasoned. “One or two at most, maybe. And after what’s happened, I think Cass would understand.”

“I’m down,” Fred said, raising his hand. “All in favor?”

Gogo raised her hand. Honey stopped stroking Hiro’s hair to raise hers, as well. The three of them looked expectantly at Wasabi. He sighed and looked at Hiro. “Are you good with this,” he asked seriously.

Hiro shrugged. “I’d really just like to not get shot again. It’s not fun.”

“I guess it would be pretty easy for me to pick you up for follow-up appointments if I was already here,” he sighed. “Alright. I’ll draw up a schedule and clear it with Cass before we do anything. And whoever’s here during the day has to help out downstairs, clear? We’re going to earn our welcome in Cass’s home.”

“It’ll be sweet, like one big rotating sleepover.” Fred grinned.

“And you can kick us out anytime,” Gogo added.

Honey Lemon carded her fingers through Hiro’s bangs again, brushing them away from his face. Hiro sat up a little. He wasn’t sure what it was, but suddenly the prospect of being alone in his own room seemed a little terrifying. “Do you guys just want to crash in here,” he asked, trying for nonchalant.

Gogo caught his eye and gave him a small, sympathetic smile. “If you’re good with it, sure.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so yeah, that's the gist of what happened. at least, what hiro knows, anyway.


	10. Chapter 10

Hiro woke up choking.

His chest ached, the half-remembered weight of the bullet inside his ribcage completely out of proportion to its size. He struggled to breath, hands scrabbling at his blankets, his pillows, the edges of his mattress.

Hands clamped around his wrists, the fingers small and calloused against his pulse point. “Hiro, it’s only a bad dream,” someone whispered to him firmly somewhere overhead.

Hiro sucked in a rough, stuttering gasp for air. He felt tears on his face, and he couldn’t tell if he was crying, or if his eyes were watering from not getting enough oxygen. “I ca-- I c--”

“Shhh, Hiro, it’s alright, just take a deep breath and hold it, okay?”

Shaking, Hiro did as instructed, pulling in as much air as he could stand and holding his breath. His lungs protested, the scar on his chest tight and uncomfortable.

“Good, now let it go. Slowly. That’s it, you’re okay.”

Hiro exhaled as slowly as possible, and the hands on his wrists loosened and vanished entirely. He opened his eyes and squinted up at the dark outline of Gogo sitting on the edge of his bed. The logo on her t-shirt - _Ghost in Training_ , it read - glowed just enough to be visible. Hiro struggled to sit up. “Sorry,” he murmured, his face heating up.

“Nope,” Gogo said shortly.

A sound from the floor by Tadashi’s side of the room drew their attention. Fred was sitting up on his elbows in his sleeping bag, squinting up at the blearily. “S’goin’ on?”

“Bad dream, no worries,” Gogo said. “I got it.”

“Mm. Wake me up for the next one,” Fred mumbled, laying back down and rolling over.

Hiro pressed his palms to his face and took a few shaky breaths. “I’m okay,” he said quietly after a few seconds.

Gogo nudged his shoulder, and helped him settle back down under the blankets. “Hey, scoot over,” she commanded quietly, and slid under the blankets next to him.

“Gogo?”

She tugged one of his pillows over for herself and settled down next to him. “My uncle died when I was really little,” she began quietly. Hiro studied her face in the dark, watching as she hooked one arm over the top of the blankets. “But he was sick for a long time before that - kidney disease, I think. It wasn’t pretty. My dad insisted we go visit him every Sunday for like, three months until they sent him home. I had nightmares about hospitals and skeletons trying to strap me down with those creepy-ass leather restraints for _years_ after he died.”

Gogo paused, inhaled, and continued, “I mean, they weren’t every night, but they’d come in like, clusters of three or four at a time, so my mom would come and stay in my room when they were happening, and it helped a lot, knowing she was close.”

Hiro wasn’t sure what to stay. His brain was still half-asleep, and none of the gears seemed to be connecting with each other. “Tadashi used to do that,” he whispered. “When I was little, I mean. He never-- I’m sure it was super annoying, having your kid brother wake you up at two am when you have class at nine. But...he always let me...”

“Tadashi loved you,” Gogo said, drawing Hiro into a hug. Hiro scooted closer and tucked his forehead into the curve of her neck, her arm curled around his back. “And Hiro, so do we. Don’t forget that.”

Hesitantly, Hiro returned the hug with an arm draped across Gogo’s waist. “I love you too,” he mumbled. “I’m not... I don’t say it enough-- okay, _ever_ , but--”

“Shh, sshh,” Gogo interrupted, oddly gentle. “I know, kiddo. I know.”

Hiro took a slow, deliberate breath and closed his eyes. “I don’t want to go back to sleep,” he muttered.

Gogo traced a couple slow, arcing circles on Hiro’s shoulderblades. “I’m going to keep you safe, okay? I swear, you’re safe here.”

Exhausted and a little scared, Hiro shook his head against her chest and shut his eyes. “I can’t-- I can’t fight him off,” he mumbled, clutching at Gogo’s loose t-shirt.

“Shhh, kiddo, it’s okay. You don’t have to fight him off. That’s why I’m here, yeah?” She tucked Hiro in tighter against her side and let her cheek rest against his hair. “I’ve got you. I promise, I’ve got you.”

Hiro chewed his lower lip for a second, processing her words. “Don’t go,” he said, his voice small in the darkness.

“Kiddo, I’m always going to be right here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For reference, Gogo's t-shirt is this: http://www.evilsupplyco.bigcartel.com/product/ghost-in-training-t-shirt
> 
> Again, sorry this one's so short.


	11. Chapter 11

The door to Hiro’s bedroom creaked as it opened, and he twisted under his comforter to see Aunt Cass peeking through the space. “Hey, honey,” she said gently, easing into the room, “how’re you feeling?”

  
Hiro shrugged, rolling all the way over to face the door. Her bright blue apron, a stylized cat grinning from the space over the chest pocket, was dusted with streaks of flour, and she wiped her hands off on the edge of it like she wasn’t sure she’d removed the last trace of whatever she’d been making. “I’m going on a baking spree, do you feel up to giving me a hand?”

  
Hiro sat up, the comforter pooling around his waist. “Are you trying to kick-start my stress baking habit again,” he asked with a small grin. All through high school, he’d dealt with stress either by bot building or baking - Tadashi had long enabled one, his aunt the other.

  
Aunt Cass smiled back, warm and a little relieved as she braced one shoulder against the doorframe. “Me? Nooo, never,” she teased, “even if the high school robotics team practically kept my pastry case full for three months.”

  
Gingerly, Hiro slid to the edge of his bed and kicked his legs over the edge. His chest didn’t hurt the way it had, only a little twinge whenever he stretched the wrong way, and a lingering ache that he’d learned to ignore. “Are you going to make me put on shoes?”

  
“I think the San Fransokyo County Health Inspector can be satisfied with socks. Just this once.” She stepped into the room and pulled open his top drawer, rifling through to grab a pair of mismatched socks. “Did you take your pills this morning?”

  
“Mmhm, Baymax woke me up with it this time.” Hiro accepted the offered socks and tugged them on, his posture awkwardly stiff to keep from bending too far forward. He eased himself off the bed - his knee just felt sprained, which was encouraging but not _healed_. “What are we making?”

  
Aunt Cass stepped out of the room and stayed a careful two steps ahead of him down the stairs, matching his slow pace. “I dunno, I’ve got ingredients for just about everything. What do you feel like mixing up?”

  
Again, Hiro shrugged, his socks whispering on the hardwood as he crossed the living room. The couch still bore a pile of rumpled blankets and hastily stacked pillows, and a pair of backpacks - Fred’s, covered in buttons, and Honey Lemon’s, grass green with bits of yellow around the zippers - resting against the wall next to the TV. He eased on to the stairs into the cafe, one hand on the bannister. “What are we running out of?”

  
Now behind him, Aunt Cass waved an impatient hand. “Kiddo, I got the blackboard labels for a reason, we can make whatever we want! I’ve got some rough pastry dough in the mixer right now, I was going to fold up some danishes. Make some cute shapes, throw some fruit on there. People love that stuff.”

  
Hiro smiled up at her. “Can I pull down the cake recipes and see if something pops?”

  
“Sure, sure. But you stay away from that stout buttercream recipe, young man, you’re still fourteen and on medication.”

  
“Are you implying there’s beer in the bakery fridge,” he snickered and pushed open the door to the cafe. The sudden wash of noise shouldn’t have been unexpected - it had snowed again the night before, and everyone who would normally have bundled up and braved a park bench with their lunch had flooded into the cafe to get out of the cold. Hiro fought the desire to shrink back into the safety of the apartment. It was stupid, but suddenly he felt small and exposed, like everyone was going to turn around and announce his presence.

  
“Hiro, honey, you okay?”

  
He swallowed thickly and forced himself to nod. Slowly, he picked his way through the crowd - he could feel his limp coming back, it had gone from “rock in my shoe” to “sprained knee” in the space it took to get from the door to the counter in front of the door to the kitchen. A couple was studying the menu board, their coats hanging open as they leaned against each other, and Hiro gave them a tight smile before ducking his head.

  
Aunt Cass rounded the counter behind him and reached out to rub his shoulder. “Go on, I’ll be back in a minute,” she said gently, leaning over to kiss Hiro’s temple before turning back to the couple with a welcoming smile. “Hi, sorry about the wait. Have you been in here before?”

  
Hiro ducked into the kitchen before he could hear the rest of the conversation. He slumped against the cold, brushed steel of the refrigerator door and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath that only wavered a little bit.

  
“Hiro?”

  
When he opened his eyes, Honey Lemon was brushing her hands off on an apron identical to his aunt’s, rounding the center counter with a concerned little smile. “Is everything alright?”

  
He pressed his palms to his face for a second, took another breath, and came up with a smile that he hoped would reassure her. “Yep, yeah, all good here.” She gave him a skeptical look, and he exhaled, deflating a little bit. “Just, you know. Crowds not doing it for me today.”

  
Honey Lemon pulled him into a sympathetic side hug and ducked to kiss the top of his head. “I’m sorry, that’s not easy,” she said, leading him over toward a wooden barstool tucked under the lip of the counter. “Are you just down here for company, or do you feel like you want to help?”

  
“Oh, this boy can’t be in a kitchen without picking up a spoon,” Aunt Cass said from the doorway. She ruffled Hiro’s hair as she walked past to the industrial mixer in the corner. “Cake book’s on the shelf next to the panini grill.”

  
Grinning, Honey braced her lower back against the edge of the counter and studied him. “Hiro, I didn’t know you _baked_.”

  
“Yeah, well,” he said awkwardly, “it’s not common knowledge and I’d appreciate if it _stayed_ that way.”

  
Honey gave him a knowing little laugh and strode off toward the shelf full of multicolored binders. “Which one?”

  
“Purple one,” Hiro said automatically as Aunt Cass glanced over from the mixer. “Green’s for the fryer, blue’s for the ice cream and mochi mixers, yellow’s for pastries, and red’s for everything else.”

  
She handed him the three-ring binder and pulled another barstool over. One knee hooked over the other and she propped one elbow up on the counter to look over Hiro’s shoulder as he flipped it open, the plastic sheet protectors rustling as he turned them. The recipes were all on plain notebook paper, occasionally graph paper ripped uneven at the top or along one edge, some in Aunt Cass’s sprawling cursive and others in Hiro’s compact, frantic block print. Absently, Hiro licked the pad of his forefinger and scrubbed at a dried spot of something dark on the recipe for chocolate cherry cupcakes before popping his finger back in his mouth. “Mm,” he mumbled to himself, “ganache. Hey, when was the last time we made that Aztec chocolate stuff? That was good.”

  
Aunt Cass plopped a ball of pastry dough roughly the size of an infant to the counter with a sound between a _squelch_ and a _thud_ , a small haze of flour billowing up off the dusted countertop. “Laaaaast... Huh. Shoot, I know exactly the batch you’re talking about, the top oven was on the fritz and we had to remake it three times, _when_ was--” She snapped her fingers. “Columbus Day, last year. Or, you know, _not_ Columbus Day, but the holiday that has been wrongly assigned as Columbus Day.”

  
Hiro nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Those were good, we should make them again sometime.”

  
“You wanna make them today,” Aunt Cass suggested, kneading into the dough and pulling off a tennis ball-sized chunk. She looked around with a perplexed look for a moment before making a little _aha_ gesture and snagging a baking tray off the cooling rack.

  
Hiro hummed noncommittally and turned the page. The opposing sheets of plastic clung for a second, before Hiro peeled them apart. Originally, the recipe had been printed - generic, sans serif font on white computer paper, boring half-sentences and abbreviations and fractions. But over time it had been all mostly scribbled over by a variety of pens and pencils, first Aunt Cass’s handwriting and then his own, until whatever the original recipe had been was almost completely obscured. On a whim, Hiro pulled it out of the sleeve, leaving the page behind it in the plastic.

  
It was a pretty simple recipe, all things considered. Red velvet cupcakes, a winter staple in the bakery for as long as he could remember, and with an hour and a stocked kitchen, Hiro could make several dozen blindfolded. Tadashi had always asked for them for his birthday, but Hiro had never been able to figure out if he had a special affinity for them, or just chose them as the easiest option when they insisted he pick a flavor. “What do we have in the way of butter?”

  
Aunt Cass looked up from folding danishes. “For buttercream? I’m sure we have a lot, I got two of those crazy 5 pound buckets when I went shopping last time.”

  
Hiro slid off the stool and limped over to the fridge. Honey followed, hovering by him while he studied the shelves. “What do you need,” she asked, peering over his shoulder at the recipe he held. She squinted at it. “Can you read this?”

  
He waved lazily before reaching for a tub of butter and a carton of eggs. “Don’t have to. Would you mind finding the box of food coloring for me?”

  
Honey nodded and took the carton of eggs from him, setting them down on the center counter on her way to the cabinet Aunt Cass indicated. Hiro gathered the rest of his ingredients - flour, sugar, cocoa powder, a host of other plastic containers and boxes stacked in the middle of the counter. Aunt Cass passed him a pair of metal mixing bowls and a measuring cup. “Red velvet,” she asked, watching him sift together dry ingredients from memory.

  
“Tadashi always said those were his favorite,” Honey Lemon said, watching Hiro go through the familiar motions of tossing the recipe together.

  
“Oh yeah? He always asked for them for his birthday, but I could never work out whether he just asked for them because it was an answer he didn’t have to think about.”

  
Honey smiled. “He’d bring in cupcakes for all of us and he’d be _so_ excited about them because they were his favorite flavor and he didn’t get to have them often.”

  
“If he’d’ve _asked_ ,” Hiro muttered, shaking his head.

  
Aunt Cass passed behind them on her way to the fridge for danish filling ingredients. “Hiro’s been baking since he was, what? Four or five?”

  
“Kindergarten,” Hiro said over his shoulder, cracking an egg on the side of his bowl. “There was that bake sale for the community soccer team and you taught me how to make sugar cookies and it was all downhill from there.”

  
“That’s _adorable_ ,” Honey said, smiling brightly at him.

  
“Yeah, well. I started stress baking in high school - it kind of sucked, being a ten year old in a class of kids old enough to be your babysitter. Baking gave me an excuse to step away from the design pad, you know? I could come hide in the kitchen and give my brain a rest while I threw something together, and if I had to, I’d sort things out while the oven was on. Pass me the buttermilk?”

  
Aunt Cass snagged the carton and passed it to him as she walked back to her danishes. “The high school robotics team kept me in pastry for about three months when he was eleven,” she said, pulling a whisk down off a rack above her head.

  
Hiro shrugged at Honey. “Oddly, the jocks all thought I was the shit. I was like, the whole lacrosse team’s baby cousin. The _nerds_ , on the other hand, well. I was a threat to _them_. And let me tell you, all those cliches about the high school bullies shoving the tiny nerd into lockers or stuffing his head down a toilet? Nerd bullies are _way_ more cruel and creative. You ever woken up one morning, and _everything_ in your hard drive has been replaced by Dragon Tales bullshit? Homework, bot designs, those last three seasons of Warehouse 13 you were looking forward to watching over the weekend, _everything_. All gone.”

  
“Ooh, I remember that,” Aunt Cass said. “That was a bad weekend.”

  
“Incidentally, also the first time I ever made alcoholic buttercream,” Hiro said conversationally.

  
“How old were you?”

  
“Twelve.” Over her danishes, Aunt Cass cringed. Hiro pointed a batter-dipped spoon at her. “Hey, those margarita cupcakes were pretty spectacular, and you know it. And besides, it’s not like you left me down here with a bottle of tequila and said ‘go nuts,’ you supervised. I think you needed them as much as I did.”

  
“Eh, probably. You’re still not allowed to bake with alcohol alone until you’re at least sixteen, though.”

  
Hiro turned to Honey with a wry little smile. “Apparently, you would have had a chance to experience my pretty damn awesome German stout buttercream if I wasn’t on medication right now. Would’ve been a nice thing to have, especially after the month you guys have had because of me.”

Honey frowned and wrapped her arms around his shoulders from the side and rested her chin on top of his head. More or less used to such treatment, Hiro stilled, blinked, and kept on mixing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, uh. Thank y'all for your patience. It's been the semester from hell over here - 21 credits was not a smart choice, but what can you do. 
> 
> Also, since things have been a little heavy around here for the last couple chapters, I figured it was time to give the science beans a little break. So, Hiro stress bakes. 
> 
> (Every cupcake-related thing is a real recipe that I have made. They are all delicious.) 
> 
> Also guess who got BH6 on dvd for her birthday. Oh yeah. I have the greatest brother ever.


	12. Chapter 12

The SFIT Life Sciences building was a towering, arching spiral of glass and steel, spinning up into the sky like the tower screw shells he used to hunt for when Aunt Cass took them to the beach when he was little.  The lobby yawned around them, devoid of life except for a bored-looking student tucked back into an alcove across the massive space, tapping at a laptop and occasionally turning to consult the notebook on the seat next to them. Hiro edged closer to Fred, who had been mercifully aware of his diminished speed and had adjusted his own pace accordingly as they walked from the train station onto campus. After a week at home, cabin fever was slowly starting to set in, and Fred had decided that Hiro absolutely needed to come with him to whatever mystery “meeting” he had on campus.

He had to admit, breathing room and fresh air had helped him relax after spending every waking second inside too-familiar surroundings, even with the twinge in his knee after the walk and the two separate occasions he had to admit needing to stop and catch his breath. Even the short-lived anxiety over leaving the Lucky Cat ( _ they’re still out there somewhere, they’re going to find me and drag me back and keep bleeding me dry _ ) hadn’t really phased Fred - he’d talked Hiro down from the near-panic attack with the calm level-headedness of someone who had read just about every piece of advice available on the internet for just such an occasion, and had stuck within easy (not to mention frequent) hugging-distance for the rest of the journey.

“Doin’ okay, bud,” Fred asked, his lazy stride slowing as they crossed the expanse of polished concrete flooring. Hiro pulled his hands out of the pockets of his coat and nodded mutely, fumbling for a second with the zipper.

“Am I here for a reason, or is this just an excuse to get me out of the house,” he asked, eyeing the empty lobby. The tense suspicion he’d carried through the train ride up to campus had ebbed once they emerged from the crowded sidewalks and onto the wide open meadows between the campus buildings, but the open spaces presented a whole new array of dangers that he couldn’t seem to stop fixating on.

Fred wrapped an arm around his shoulder and squeezed, more firmly than any of the others were willing to just yet. “You, my fine feathered friend, are actually the reason we’re here.” He guided Hiro to a bank of elevators just around the start of the curve that would spiral up from the lobby into the classrooms and offices above. The doors to the closest one slid open immediately when Fred hit the call button, and he nudged Hiro inside. “Sixth floor,” he muttered to himself, pressing the button and leaning back against the brushed steel panels on the elevator walls.

Hiro raised an eyebrow at him. “You planning on explaining that, or...?”

Fred grinned. “You’ll see! We'll both see, actually, I don't know what this is about. I mean, I do, but I don't. Anyway. We'll both see!”

The uneasy knot in Hiro’s stomach didn’t ease at all, but he fell back into silence as the elevator made it’s silent climb to the sixth floor. A gentle, pleasant chime heralded their arrival, and Fred ushered him out into a high, curving hallway bordered on one side with a wall of windows looking out on the SFIT campus green. The flowering cherry trees were barren twigs stuck into the last vestiges of what passed for snow drifts across the lawn, and the ice over the duck pond had melted to a thick donut ringing a hole in the center. Hiro paused to look long enough for Fred’s usual exuberance to take over, and he gave him a small almost-shove down the hallway, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

A quarter of the way around the building, a frosted glass office door was standing open, and Fred made a beeline for it. “Yo, Doc,” he called, dragging Hiro into the academic clutter of a professor’s office.

“Fred,” someone exclaimed, and a cloud of tight, dark curls sprang up from behind a rolling lab cart parked near the back of the office. “How’s life, my friend?”

He nudged Hiro ahead of him into the office. “Livin’ the dream,” he grinned. “Hiro, this is Doc Bosch, she runs the molecular biotech program here. Doc, this is--”

“ _ The  _ Hiro,” Dr. Bosch interrupted, peering at him over a pair of rectangular wire-framed glasses. She pushed the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows and hiked through the clutter toward them, her skirt swirling around her knees like sea foam. Hiro shrank back from her scrutiny, and she paused before she got too close. “I’m sorry, it’s just-- Fred told me what had happened, and I, well. I’m very happy to see you up and about, after what you went through. How are you feeling?”

Hiro bit down on a grimace. “I’m alright,” he mumbled, managing a small smile. “Could’ve been worse, honestly.”

“ I’ll say,” she agreed sympathetically, before focusing on Fred. “Well. I had a chance to look at the materials you brought by the other day, and just skimming some of the notebooks, I can tell you that what these people were working on is some very fringe research in biological delivery of nanites,” she explained, leading them back into a small lab space set up at the back of the lab. “Some of this is actually very cool, some very innovative thoughts on getting nanobots past the body’s immune system, but I’m seeing a lot of very scary applications for anyone not fabricating these in some sort of peer-reviewed, controlled lab context. You said they were keeping him - ah,  _ you _ , sorry - in some kind of unfinished basement?”

Fred peered at the dirty, scuffed notebook sitting open on the lab counter. “Damn, that’s some straight-up supervillain shit right there.”

Dr. Bosch opened a mini-fridge and pulled out a styrofoam cooler with bright orange biohazard stickers affixed to the center of every face. She popped the lid off, revealing a stack of burgundy transfusion bags squishing in against the sides, labeled with dates and times in black sharpie. Hiro’s vision went white at the edges - that was  _ his blood _ , the hand that had labeled each bag was the hand that had held him down and shoved a needle into his arm, and--

“You okay?” Fred curled one hand around the back of Hiro’s neck, warm and grounding, drawing his attention away from the transfusion bags.

“Y-yeah,” Hiro managed, reaching up for Fred’s wrist. “Just, um.”

Dr. Bosch dragged her desk chair over and helped him sit down. “Breathe,” Fred coached, crouching down in front of his knees. “I gotcha, little dude, you’re good, just keep breathin’.” Hiro bent forward, his forehead falling against Fred’s shoulder.

“ I am so sorry, I didn’t even think to  _ ask  _ if you’d--” Dr. Bosch crossed her arms tightly across her ribs, like she couldn’t figure out what else to do with them.

Hiro exhaled unsteadily and raised his head. “It’s okay,” he said, making an attempt at a smile for her sake, “just. That’s not supposed to be  _ outside  _ my body, you know?”

She returned his smile with an uneasy one of her own. “You can say that again,” she muttered, turning back to her lab equipment. Fred gave him another concerned glance, and Hiro nodded.  _ I’ll be fine _ . Dr. Bosch did a better job shielding the storage bags as she pulled one out of the styrofoam box, glancing nervously at him over her shoulder. “So, um. I did a few microscope slides from the oldest bag and the newest -  _ that  _ was an adventure, that’s usually the kind of thing I hand off to my work studies so I wasn’t sure if I actually remembered how to do one myself for a minute there - but I did a few slides and well.” She met Fred’s gaze and her eyebrows went up. “Perhaps you’d like to take a look?”

Fred squeezed Hiro’s shoulder and moved into the space she vacated in front of the microscope. “Which bag is this?”

“The oldest.” Fred leaned into the microscope, and his posture went suspiciously rigid. Dr. Bosch fussed with a thin gold chain around her neck, watching him examine the sample.

Hiro looked between them, anxiety crawling back into the pit of his stomach. “What is it,” he asked, unable to raise his voice over an appropriate library volume. It still seemed to echo in the office, and he winced.

Fred straightened, his expression uncharacteristically serious. “You should probably see this,” he said, holding out a hand to help Hiro stand up. He shuffled around to let Hiro at the microscope, but kept a hand on his shoulder as he leaned into the eyepiece.

The familiar clusters of purplish blood cells were interspersed with small grey discs, hugging the outsides of the clusters almost like they were trying to hide from detection. A few of them were vibrating a little bit, like they wanted to get back to whatever they’d been programmed to do. Hiro raised his head a little, stunned and a little sick. “That’s... They’re in  _ my  _ blood?”

“Yes,” Dr. Bosch said, sounding a little uneasy herself. “From what I’ve been able to see, there’s been an exponential replication between the newest samples and the oldest. The nanites have been taking cellular tissue from the natural blood cells and have been repurposing it to.... Essentially to build more, on a cellular level.”

The room spun, and Hiro sunk willingly back into the desk chair. “What... What do they do?”

She crossed her arms again. “I’m not sure yet,” she admitted, “there seems to be a notebook missing from somewhere in the sequence. But...from what I’ve been able to unravel? It looks like these nanites were...a controlled delivery mechanism. For a disease, some sort of chemical contaminate, they were designed as...the ultimate in designer bioterrorism. They’re more or less inert, until someone presses the-- Well, the kill switch.”

“You could infect a whole blood bank with these things,” Fred murmured. One hand landed in Hiro’s hair, and Hiro tilted toward him, staring blankly at the cabinet doors under the counter. “...Is there a way to tell if Hiro’s been infected?”

Dr. Bosch winced. “I’d have to give that some more thought,” she admitted. “But I’ll definitely keep working on it. If I had that last notebook, that would probably answer a lot of questions on its own?”

Fred nodded. “I’ll see what I can do,” he promised. “Thanks for the work you’ve put in on this, I know your schedule is very busy, especially with classes starting soon.”

“I’m happy to be able to help,” she said. Fred helped Hiro stand and ushered him toward the office door. “I’ll keep working on this - and Hiro, I understand you missed finals because of, well. I’d be happy to bully any of your professors from last semester into letting you take them late, generally the faculty is pretty well behaved, especially in the robotics department, but you never know, and if anyone deserves some breathing room on their GPA, I’d say it’s you.”

Hiro gave her a tired, grateful smile over his shoulder. “Thank you,” he murmured, leaning against Fred’s side.

She reached over to the bookshelf next to her desk and grabbed a business card out of a small holder shaped like the  _ live long and prosper  _ gesture from Star Trek. “Shoot me an email, I’ll try to keep you in the loop with what I find,” she said. Her smile turned a little sad and sympathetic. “I really am glad you’re feeling okay, Hiro. It was very nice to be able to meet you.”

“Yeah, you too,” he said, sliding the business card into his coat pocket.

“Thanks, Doc,” Fred said, nudging Hiro out into the hallway. “I’ll be in touch, if we find anything new.”

“Likewise,” Dr. Bosch said. “Thanks for coming by, Fred.”

Both of them were silent as they walked back to the elevators. Hiro folded his arms around himself, the scar on his chest pulling faintly. “All that, and I’m still gonna die,” he muttered around a humorless little laugh. “Unbelievable.”

“ You are  _ not  _ going to die,” Fred insisted. “For all we know, the nanites never got down the stairs to you. We’re not gonna let anything happen to you, bud.”

Hiro nodded absently, still folded in on himself. Without much warning, Fred pulled him into his chest and wrapped both arms around his back, one hand clutching Hiro’s head to his shoulder. “You are not going to die,” he repeated, like he could speak the outcome he wanted into being with enough conviction. Hiro inhaled and wrapped his arms around Fred’s torso, clinging to his jacket. “So help me God, Hiro, whatever we have to do to protect you, it  _ will _ happen. They  _ are not _ allowed to take you from us. You hear me? We won’t let them take you from us again, and  _ definitely  _ not permanently.”

And if Hiro hung on a little too tight for a little too long, eyes stinging from trying to hold down a fresh wave of tears (he was sick of crying, sick of being fragile, but there was nothing he could do), well. Fred didn’t say anything, and there was no one else around to see it. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahahahahahahaha i survived the semester from h e l l
> 
> Truth be told, I've been home for three weeks, but like, I forgot all about this thing until someone commented, and I've had enough time away from it that I was actually able to figure out what was going on in that basement!! So that's something!! Plot should pick up from here, but as always, no promises, I start work on Monday so like, who the hell knows what my writing stamina's gonna look like. 
> 
> Thank you all for your patience!!


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: brief discussion of suicidal thoughts. nothing graphic, but be ye warned. real notes at the end.

Hiro didn’t come out of his room for dinner, and only mutely returned Gogo’s hug when she came up to tell him she was heading home for the night. To his knowledge, no one but him and Fred knew about the nanites coursing through his bloodstream - Fred had left that up to his discretion, and after the trek home (punctuated by a stop for hot chocolate, which had made him feel a little better), Hiro really didn’t have the energy to experience that revelation all over again. So when Gogo had sat on his bed and hugged him and ruffled his hair, still firmly entrenched in their new, painful version of normal, he could only wonder if this would be the last time he saw her, if the men who’d kidnapped him were out there somewhere waiting to hit the kill switch.

“Everything okay,” she’d asked when he hung onto her just a second too long.

He’d given her a weak smile and a stock answer, not wanting to worry her any more than she already was. “Just tired,” he’d said, “the walk kind of wiped me out.”

“Yeah,” she said sympathetically, her fingers curling around the side of his neck just under his jaw for a second, fingertips pressing gently against his skin to check his pulse. It was an odd habit she’d picked up after they'd brought him home from the hospital, like she worried he might keel over dead at any minute. Which, as a thing to be afraid about, wasn’t actually so far outside the realm of possibility now. “Get some sleep, and take it easy tomorrow, okay?” He’d nodded, and she’d ruffled his hair again before standing up and leaving.

He must have fallen asleep after that, because when he startled awake again, the room was dark aside from the strip of light pollution leaking under the blackout curtains, and the clock across the room on Tadashi’s nightstand read 2:16am. Quietly, he crawled out from under his blankets and shuffled toward the door - it was late enough that he could probably get away with sneaking a poptart from the kitchen and going back to bed. He doubted anyone would still be up at this hour.

As he reached the landing around the corner from the lower level of the apartment, he found that he’d miscalculated. Fred and Wasabi were, in fact, still awake, and talking quietly just over the faint background noise of Mythbusters reruns. Hiro paused, one palm flat on the wall beside him, and crept a little closer to listen.

“Yeah, man, I dunno,” Fred sighed, and the shadow from the tv on the wall behind them gestured vaguely. “It’s just a really heavy thing, y’know? And I said I wouldn’t tell anyone, until he was ready for the group to know about it, but it’s just eating at me now. He’s probably gonna be upset I told you.”

Wasabi’s shadow nodded. “Well, your secret’s safe with me, either way. I would’ve thought you’d be all over this, though, it’s straight out of a comic book.”

“Yeah, see, that’s the thing,” Fred exclaimed quietly, sounding frustrated. “Just on it’s own, this is the coolest shit ever! It’s got all the right narrative twists, it’s the _perfect_ conflict, I couldn’t write it better myself if I tried, but...” He sighed. “It’s also _Hiro_. And the more I think about it, the less cool it gets, because he could _die_ , like. Permanently. We could _lose_ him. So... I dunno.”

“It’s not a game anymore,” Wasabi filled in solemnly.

“No, it’s not.” Fred’s shadow bowed his head. “And I can’t help it, but part of me kinda misses the days when it was.”

Wasabi sighed. “Honestly, Fred, I don’t think this has been a game since the island. But yeah, I know what you mean. ...How long do you think Hiro’s going to try to carry this on his own?”

Fred groaned, and his shadow’s head merged with the back of the couch. “Who the hell knows. I mean, he knows he’s got me with this, I was _with_ him when he found out, but I really think there’s more that’s been going on with him lately than just feeling like we’re too busy to talk to. It’s like he’s convinced that we don’t _want_ to help him.”

“Or that he’s not worth it,” Wasabi added quietly, his voice tense and worried. “Apparently depression is a pretty common post-surgery side effect, from what I’ve read recently, and we all know how Hiro was after Tadashi... Anyway, I added the symptoms to Baymax’s monitoring protocols, but I kind of feel like I’m grasping at straws here.”

“Don’t we all,” Fred muttered. “...Honestly? I’m a little scared for him.”

Wasabi was quiet for a long moment, and Hiro leaned against the wall, trying to keep his breathing even and silent. He’d tried _so_ hard to keep the team away from the worst of what he was feeling so they wouldn’t worry, wouldn’t feel like they had to babysit him constantly, and he couldn’t even manage to do that right. “Do you really think he’d try something,” Wasabi asked quietly, and Hiro slid to the floor.

It wasn’t like the thought hadn’t crossed his mind. Not seriously - more often, he just wondered if things wouldn’t have been easier if he’d bled out into that dirty mattress, or stopped breathing en route to the hospital. Would it really have mattered if the man’s aim had just been an inch or so to the left? Hiro’s knees folded up against his chest, arms winding around his shins to form a protective ball around the still-pink surgical scar on his chest. His forehead pressed against his kneecaps and he slid one hand into his hair, palm curling around the back of his head and pressing it tighter into his knees.

A floorboard squeaked, and Hiro flinched away from it. “Hiro? Hey, little man, what’s going on,” Wasabi asked, and the bottom step creaked as he sat down. “...Guess you heard all that, huh.”

Hiro’s throat was too tight to answer, so he just nodded into his knees, the cotton of his pajama pants worn and soft against his forehead. Wasabi’s palm came to rest against his shoulder, and Hiro jolted hard enough that Wasabi pulled back immediately. “Okay, it’s okay,” he coaxed gently, and the stairs creaked again as he shifted up a couple steps to sit across from Hiro on the landing. Hiro sucked in a rough gasp and curled tighter, his chest aching as he tried to compress himself into nothing. “Shh, okay, just take a minute. It’s alright, I promise.”

“I’m sorry,” Hiro managed after a few seconds. His voice sounded like he was trying desperately not to cry, and he squeezed his eyes shut tighter against his kneecaps.

“Hey,” Wasabi chided, “none of that.”

Hiro sniffed miserably and turned his face toward the wall behind him. “I’m just one more thing,” he muttered, hating himself.

More cautiously this time, Wasabi set his palm against Hiro’s shoulder. “Right now, you’re _the_ thing,” he said, and when Hiro didn’t move away from him, he started rubbing small circles through the material of his t-shirt. “Hiro, we’re just worried about you, because we want you to be okay, right? No one’s upset, or annoyed, or whatever. There is literally nothing we could be doing that would qualify as being more important than helping you get back on your feet.” He sighed, and shifted a little closer to Hiro’s bare feet. “I guess I’m just at a loss for what I can say that will make you believe that.”

Unable to quite stop himself, Hiro leaned into Wasabi’s palm, and found himself being pulled across the landing into Wasabi’s side. He tucked himself into the hug that wrapped around him, spent and exhausted. He sighed, reaching up to scrub ineffectually at his face. The same floorboard creaked in front of them, and Hiro looked up to find Fred with a glass of water and the box of tissues that lived by the couch for Cass’s Hallmark movie binges. He settled down on the other side of Hiro’s feet, toes hanging off the edge of the step, and held the tissue box out to him with a sympathetic look. Hiro gave a weak tug on the tissue sprouting from the plastic film and wiped at his face, slumped almost halfway in Wasabi’s lap. Fred nudged his ankle with the glass of water. “Small sips,” he cautioned as Hiro took it from him.

Wasabi took the glass when Hiro lowered it again, half-drained. For a long time, no one spoke, and the only sound was Hiro trying to keep his breathing under control. “...I’m not going to kill myself,” he said finally, his voice hardly louder than a whisper. “I-- I won’t.”

In his peripheral vision, he felt Fred and Wasabi exchange a glance over his head. “I don’t _want_ to die,” he added, suddenly feeling like it was urgent that they know that. “I mean, not now.”

He felt Wasabi’s arm around his back go a little tighter. By his feet, Fred tensed. “...What do you mean,” he asked, like he was afraid of the answer.

Shame swept over Hiro like a wave breaking over his head, and he flinched down into Wasabi’s side, shaking his head. “It’s-- Nevermind, it’s not--”

“Hiro,” Wasabi said, his voice quiet and sad and entirely without room for argument. Hiro stopped babbling immediately and sank into himself like he was trying to disappear. “Please, just talk to us.”

His eyes burned with tears again, and he bent forward to press his face back into his knees. Wasabi rubbed his arm, his palm big and warm through Hiro’s t-shirt, and for a brief, delirious second, Hiro thought that was what _safe_ felt like - Wasabi’s hand on his back, solid and unmoving - and he couldn’t lose that, or he’d crumble altogether. He felt small and sad and scared, and suddenly it occurred to him that maybe they’d all get fed up with his stubborn radio silence and give up, and he choked on the sudden terror the thought brought up into his throat. “I don’t-- I don’t want to die,” he repeated, sounding almost frantic to his own ears. “I mean, I do, kind of, but I don’t want to die _now_ , just. Sometimes-- I just want to _be_ dead. It’d-- It’d be better. Easier, for everybody.”

Wasabi exhaled like he’d been punched in the stomach, and Fred set the tissue box down on the floor in front of the stairs and pulled himself forward onto his knees. He took Hiro by the shoulders and gave him a small shake. “Listen to me,” he said when he looked up, his voice more serious and intense than Hiro had ever heard it. “Hiro Hamada, you _listen_ to me. It would not be easier. It _definitely_ would not be better. It would _kill_ us. You didn’t see what happened to us when Tadashi died.” Hiro gave what amounted to a full-body wince, and Fred softened. “We don’t fault you for that, you were grieving too. But seriously. Gogo got drunk and nearly wrapped her bike around a tree. Honey Lemon didn’t leave the lab for a week. A _week_ , Hiro, Wasabi and I had to practically fight her to get her to sleep or eat anything. We almost fell _apart_ when he died, and you know what was the _only_ thing that kept us together? _You_. Knowing that you still needed us to be there gave us a reason to hold it together until we were able to start healing. And if we had to go through that loss again, only you weren’t here? We _would_ fall apart.”

“We made your brother a promise, after he died,” Wasabi said, a low, sad rumble against Hiro’s back, “that we wouldn’t leave you to grieve on your own. We promised we would protect you.” He wrapped both arms around Hiro’s thin, trembling shoulders. “You aren’t going to run us off if you’re honest with us, Hiro. We aren’t going to decide that you’re too much trouble and just up and leave. Aside from that just being a tremendously awful way to treat someone you care about, none of us have any intention of going back on that promise. If you can’t have faith right now in the fact that we love you, at least have faith in the fact that we loved Tadashi.”

Hiro choked on nothing and turned into Wasabi’s chest. His hands curled in Wasabi’s sweater, too terrified to let go. “I don’t want to die,” he sobbed, muffled by the hug he was enveloped in, and he felt one of Fred’s hands press against his lower back. “I really don’t want to die, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I--”

“Shhhh, I know,” Wasabi soothed, his breath warm through Hiro’s hair. “We’re going to get through this. All five of us, I promise.”

“Six,” Fred corrected. Hiro didn’t look up, but felt Wasabi raise his head to look at him. “Six. Baymax makes six."

“Yeah,” Wasabi said, smoothing a hand down Hiro’s spine. “Him too. All six of us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Someone commented on the last chapter that Fred was a little OOC. Given that, as the author, I know how he got from point A (movie!Fred) to point B (here) and as such didn't really think much about it, it gave me pause, and I tried to explain it in this chapter. Hope it makes a little more sense now.


	14. Chapter 14

If any of them were in the mood to joke about things, Aunt Cass might have said that if getting kidnapped was all it took to get Hiro to willingly do chores, she would’ve hired someone to grab him outside his school years ago. Truthfully, it _was_ just about the only time in the last twelve years that he’d taken out the trash or scrubbed out the inside of the walk-in cooler without at least twenty minutes of bitching in preparation first, nevermind without being asked in the first place. Keeping busy seemed to help keep him from sliding any further down the steep incline that had become his emotional state, and everyone tended to worry about him less when he was on his hands and knees with a scrub brush, rather than curled up in bed.

Wasabi remained fairly strict about the whole “keep the exertion to a minimum” thing, but the physical therapist had been pleased enough by his progress that he hadn’t batted an eye at the notion of Hiro returning to his part-time job. He’d even encouraged the physical activity within reason, when Wasabi had brought up what he called “post-operative depression syndrome” at the last appointment. Hiro had winced at it - it just sounded like one more complicated problem he couldn’t handle on his own - but the physical therapist had been careful to reassure him that it was actually a pretty common reaction to any kind of surgery, not just something as traumatic as a lung injury. “I can give you a referral to a pretty great behavioral therapist,” he’d offered, and mercifully Wasabi knew enough of his reactions to be able to decline for him when the notion froze Hiro to his core. “We’ll think about it, if that’s okay. Maybe do some shopping around on our own.”

Not if he could help it, Hiro had thought, caught in a stubborn, cold fear, but the physical therapist had nodded sagely and merely asked to be kept in the loop regarding their treatment options.

Hiro hauled the trash bin out into the alley, the back door falling shut behind him with an echo-y bang. The Lucky Cat split the garbage collection bill with the landlord of the building next door, since neither really produced enough garbage on their own to justify having a full dumpster unto themselves, so Hiro always half-expected to take the trash out and meet someone else doing the same, with the same unease that some people open secluded public bathroom stalls, anticipating finding a dead body. He looked around the alley and breathed a sigh of relief when he found himself alone, with only the dumpster and a pigeon perched on the fire escape next door for company.

With a little effort, he dragged the kitchen bin across the uneven asphalt, the plastic wheels stuttering across a dozen tiny potholes. Hiro grunted and pulled the bin to a stop next to the dumpster. He slid the edge of the bag up over the rim and tied it, glancing at the street down the alley as a smart car zipped past. “Here we go,” he muttered bravely to himself, before hauling the bag up out of the interior of the bin. A day’s worth of commercial trash was heavy, and he had to rest the bag precariously on the edge before he could push it up and over the side of the dumpster. “Holy shit, ow,” he sighed, taking a few steps to lean against the brick wall across the narrow alley for a minute to catch his breath. He still got winded embarrassingly easily, and he even had an inhaler sitting on his desk upstairs that Wasabi might lecture him about not carrying with him at all times for emergencies. Oh well, what he didn’t know wouldn’t kill him.

So focused on taking slow, deep breaths, his eyes closed and his back pressed against the cold, rough brick, Hiro almost didn’t notice a car pull to a stop on the street in front of the alley. He opened his eyes as the passenger door slammed shut, and found someone walking up the alley toward him.

It took him a minute to realize why the man made him so instinctively nervous. He’s only seen him a couple of times - the man with the transfusion bags had been his only visitor for most of the ordeal - but there was something in the tense set of the man’s shoulders, the way he held his jaw clenched underneath a short, wiry salt-and-pepper beard, that had Hiro believing for the briefest of seconds that he’d just been dragged through the garage door from the van all over again.

“No,” Hiro murmured, terror paralyzing him against the brick wall. The man gave him a grim, ugly smile and pulled his hand from the pocket of what had likely once been a very expensive coat, flicking a switchblade open as he lumbered closer. The quiet _snick_ was enough to snap Hiro out of his terrified trance, and he pushed himself off the wall and darted behind the dumpster.

The man followed with a rumble like he was trying to suppress an enraged yell. Hiro looked back toward the other end of the alley just as a moving truck backed in, blocking his exit. “No,” he gasped, ducking behind the dumpster in a futile attempt at hiding.

“Come here,” the man growled, boxing him into the corner made by the dumpster and the wall behind it. He grabbed Hiro by the collar and dragged him up, wrapping a surprisingly strong arm across his chest to hold him still. “Quit struggling, boy, this’ll be over soon enough.”

“No,” Hiro yelled, squirming frantically against the man’s chest. The blade came up under his chin, cold against the skin just under the hinge of his jaw. Instinctively, Hiro jammed his elbow into the man’s abdomen as hard as possible, just like Gogo had shown him one night when they’d been waiting for the 3D printer to finish running. The knife nicked him as the man wheezed and dropped his arm, the wound stinging in the cold air. Hiro kicked at the man’s shin and took off running as he buckled, making a frantic grab for the back door as soon as the handle was within reach.

Honey was glazing a batch of danishes at the center counter when he came tumbling through into the kitchen. “Hiro,” she asked, setting her piping bag down and wiping her hands on her apron. “What’s wrong?”

“Help me,” he gasped, skidding around to the other side of an auxiliary refrigerator they kept for catering orders or when they went crazy and made way too much of something to keep excess in the walk-in. Technically, they could roll it to any part of the kitchen, but it was too heavy for one person to move alone, so they left it by the back door most of the time. Hiro braced his full weight against the side and shoved - he could barely budge the thing on his own. “Come _on,_ help me, he’s coming!”

Without another word, Honey hurried over and helped him shove the behemoth of an industrial appliance in front of the back door. Hiro slumped against the side, breathing hard and shaking like a leaf. “What is-- Oh my _god_ , Hiro, you’re bleeding!”

He lifted one trembling hand to the side of his neck and touched just under his jaw. His fingers came away slick with blood, and his vision swam at the sight. She grabbed his shoulders to keep him from sliding to the floor. “Come on,” she said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and grabbing a towel from the drawer as she led him across the kitchen. “Keep pressure on it,” she instructed, shielding the injury from view as she ushered him out into the cafe.

Aunt Cass was refilling a cup of tea at a window table and chatting animatedly with an elderly Japanese lady perched on a chair that seemed to be twice her size. She glanced up at Honey Lemon and Hiro and froze, staring at him like he’d lost a limb on his trash run. “I’ll be right back,” Honey called across the tables between them, doing a remarkable job of sounding like her usual sunny self. “Don’t worry, I’ve got it handled.”

She guided Hiro into the stairs to the apartment before Aunt Cass could reply, and helped him climb the stairs. “Here, sit down,” she said gently, leading him over to the couch. “Take slow, deep breaths, I’ll be right back, okay?”

Hiro nodded weakly and watched her head for the stairs to his room. “Baymax,” she called, her footsteps thumping up to his bedroom door. After a minute, she returned, carrying his favorite blanket and trailing Baymax behind her. The nursebot shuffled around the couch and stood before him, Honey hovering nervously over his shoulder.

“You have been injured,” Baymax noted calmly, and even through the disorienting panic, all Hiro could think was _no shit, Sherlock_. “Please remove the towel, so I may assess the damage.”

Slowly, Hiro pulled the hand towel away from the side of his neck. Baymax tilted toward him, bending at his mechanical hips. “You have suffered a minor laceration just below your jaw. The injury has not damaged your carotid artery, and will not require stitches. I will clean and sterilize the area, then apply a liquid bandage to prevent further blood loss.” His white, fluffy hands reached forward, and for a small, irrational second, Hiro saw the man in the alley reaching down for him in Baymax’s place. He flinched back into the couch, curling in on himself, and Baymax straightened up, hands lowering. “I will not hurt you, Hiro.”

Honey came to sit beside him. “It’s okay,” she murmured, stroking his hair. “It’s just Baymax, and I’m right here.”

Hiro forced himself to relax, and Baymax reached for him again, more slowly this time. The warm nylon brushed his face, tilting his head up and exposing the injury. He closed his eyes and tried to get his breathing under control. The disinfectant stung, and Hiro hissed, but forced himself not to move.

At last, Baymax let go of Hiro’s face and took a step backward. “Your pulse is coming within normal range,” he noticed as Hiro opened his eyes again. “You should begin to feel a drop in energy associated with a loss of adrenaline.” A small engine whirred, and Baymax held out a bright red sucker. “You have been a good boy. Have a lollipop.”

With shaking fingers, Hiro took the sucker and started trying to work the wrapper off. “Thanks, Baymax,” he muttered, ducking his head. The liquid bandage over the wound felt tight as his skin moved, like dried superglue.

“Hiro,” Honey said carefully, reaching behind him to wrap his blanket around his shoulders. “Can you tell me what happened?”

He clutched at the worn microplush with one hand and grabbed for her hand with the other. “I...” He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and started over, trying desperately to keep the fear out of his voice. “They found me,” he whispered, and looked up at her in time to see her eyes widen. “The men who-- Who kidnapped me. He... He tried to--”

“Shh,” Honey soothed when his voice failed him. She pulled him into a hug, working her fingers through his hair. “It’s okay, you’re safe now. I texted the others, they’re on their way.”

Hiro curled up against her shoulder, working his sneakers off before he accidently pulled them up on the couch. “Can you stay, just for a minute,” he asked, his voice small. “Just until someone else gets here?”

“Of course I will. Your aunt would never forgive me if I left you up here alone.”

After a minute, footsteps came pounding up the stairs, shattering the quiet of the apartment. “Hiro,” Gogo called sharply, accompanied by the tiny squeak of her worn bike shoes skidding on the hardwood. “Hiro,” she said again when he lifted his head off Honey Lemon’s shoulder, half the volume and audibly relieved as she came sliding around the side of the couch. She hit her knees in front of him and reached up for him, dragging him down into a tight, desperate hug. “What happened, are you okay,” she demanded, pushing him back a little and tilting his head so she could inspect the wound on the side of his neck.

“I’m okay,” he confirmed, one hand curling around hers on the side of his jaw. She took a breath and turned her hand so it was palm-up in his, giving his fingers a squeeze. “The-- One of the guys who took me, he...”

In an instant, Gogo’s face went from open relief to cold fury. “He did _what_ ,” she demanded, looking sharply at Honey before returning her attention to Hiro. “ _Fucking_ \-- I swear, when I _find him_ \--”

“Gogo,” Honey chided, somewhere between soothing and reprimanding. Gogo turned to her again, glowering, and Honey met her glare with an even look. “I need to go tell Cass what happened,” she said quietly, and some of the fight left Gogo’s tense shoulders.

“Yeah, do that,” she said, taking Honey’s place on the couch when she stood up. “I’ve got him.”

“Thank you,” Honey said. She leaned over and pressed a gentle kiss to Hiro’s forehead. “I’ll be right downstairs, okay?”

He nodded weakly, curling tighter in his blanket as he watched her go over his shoulder. Gogo rubbed his shoulder, and he slumped into her palm.

“Can you tell me what happened,” she asked seriously, pulling her legs up underneath her.

He took a deep breath. “I... I was taking the trash out. I’d just gotten the bag into the dumpster, and I was catching my breath against the wall when a car stopped on the street, in front of the alley. I didn’t really think much of it until someone got out, and when I looked, the...” He swallowed thickly and closed his eyes. “The other man from the house was walking toward me. I tried to run, but the other end of the alley was blocked, and he pulled a knife, and he-- He was going to kill me, Gogo, I panicked.”

“You’re okay,” Gogo said, and somehow her matter-of-fact tone settled him more than Honey’s gentle soothing had. “Do you remember what kind of car it was?”

For a moment, it seemed like the weirdest question she could've possibly asked - what did the _car_ have to do with the people who’d tried to kill him twice now? Then Hiro’s brain kicked back into gear - there was a traffic camera at the intersection on the corner, if they could find the car, they could find a DMV registration, an owner. It was a lead they hadn't had this morning. “It-- It was a blue sedan. Light blue, almost a silver, kind of. I didn’t see what model it was, but it kinda looked like Dr. Ishiru’s car, a little bit? The trunk had sort of the same silhouette.”

“Light blue sedan with the same general shape as a Nissan Altima, passed through this intersection at what? About 10:25 this morning,” Gogo asked. She gave him a hard-edged smile when he nodded and reached over to ruffle his hair. “I think I can work with that. Nice job, kid.”

More footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Aunt Cass came rushing around the end of the couch. “Hiro,” she cried, and Gogo had just enough time to hop off the couch before Aunt Cass was almost on top of where she’d been sitting, dragging Hiro into a tight hug. “My god, Honey just told me what happened, are you okay?”

“M’fine, Aunt Cass,” he muttered into her shoulder, wrapping his arms around her waist. She curled a hand around the back of his head and rocked him a little bit. “Just shook up, is all. Baymax took care of the worst of it.”

She jolted backward and grabbed his jaw to inspect the cut. He made a small, unhappy noise as she tilted his head back - he was getting really sick of people moving his head around today. “Oh my _god_ ,” she exclaimed, pressing her free hand to her mouth. “Was it...?”

Hiro ducked his head, and Gogo put a hand on Cass’s shoulder. “We’re going to find the people that did this,” she said, and Hiro could see her standing in his garage, promising that they’d catch Callaghan with the exact same tone. Somehow, it eased what was left of the anxiety tied up in his chest. “And we’re going to keep Hiro safe. But,” she added, and Cass looked up at her, eyes wide. Gogo paused, set her jaw, and sat down on the coffee table to be at more or less eye level with the two of them. “Hiro’s not safe here anymore. And I think we need to talk about him staying somewhere else.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look at that, I found my groove again and everything. Real, authentic, 100% pure plot here this chapter, folks. Thank you for your patience with my emotional hurt/comfort kick.


End file.
